Who can afford houses in Hampstead?

[shteiner]

I don't want to hear about people who bought 20 years ago and gained from 300% house price increases. I'm talking about people today, who actually has a decent enough salary to afford a £1.2mil 2 bed flat.

Hampstead in North London that is

Inherited wealth.

And people who bought with a 100% mortgage in an area which has increased in value in the last 15 years. A couple who got married in their early 30s, having both owned property they'd made a bomb on (in London) could potentially go to not far off £1m.

And those of us who have just worked bloody hard all their life and saved /invested and aren't wasteful.

It's not a case of 'not being wasteful! It's a case of having very substantial equity / savings and a very good salary or two good salaries of well above the London average of £35k.

It's a daft question, because someone from e.g. the rural Welsh Valleys could equally ask how someone could afford a house in (say) the Home Counties.

Some people get paid more than others. Some people get paid shit loads more than others. T'was ever thus.

The Valleys person may be gobsmacked at the Home Counties person, who in turn may be gobsmacked by the Hampstead person, who may in turn be gobsmacked by a Knightsbridge person.

And those of us who have just worked bloody hard all their life and saved /invested and aren't wasteful

Yes but worked hard at what? Two nurses won’t be buying in Hampstead, will they? Don’t be disingenuous.

@HopeClearwater - quite!

Inheritance, city jobs, previously owning properties and pooling resources, downsizing.

And those of us who have just worked bloody hard all their life and saved /invested and aren't wasteful.

But it would take two people both on the average UK wage of £25k 30 years to save £1.2m, and that was provided that they saved every single penny they earned - no housing, food, utility, living costs. If they used half their joint salary to live and the other half to save then it would take 60 years. Obviously this is a blunt calculation and doesn't take into consideration interest, pay rises etc, but the fact is that it's out of the reach of the vast majority of people - no matter how hard they've worked or saved and how little they've wasted.

If I had that amount of money I wouldn't buy property in Hampsteqd, theres something about it I have never liked.

DSis other half has a flat in Hampstead. He's 26. £600k deposit from Dad.

You can obviously buy there for less than £1.2 million: www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-77040410.html

My Dsis has recently bought there with her DH. Their first property was a really run down inexpensive home in the north. It was in a really nice area but needed a fair bit of cosmetic repair. They made £100k profit when they sold it 7 years later.

She is a solicitor earning about £30k and he’s a not long qualified barrister earning probably double that. Both from the north, hard workers with no family money behind them.

They probably don’t live in the best part of Hampstead (if there is one, I don’t know London at all) but it is doable for normal people to live there.

You can get a 2 bed flat for 700,000k or move out a bit further and get a nice house with a garden.

Just had a look and median price for a 3 bed house in Hampstead is around £4 million - so how much saving and working hard would someone on £35K have to do exactly? Even if two salaries? Absolutely no chance, even over a life time! They'd get 4 x combined salaries (£280K) on the mortgage plus whatever they can save up, which would be about 3.7 mil.

It'll be inherited wealth, or people who work at the very top levels in the City and finance, or the very few highest level showbiz people OP.

I love Hampstead. I'm very happy where we live now, in a much less expensive but still very green part of London, but the Heath is glorious. I've always coveted a house that overlooks one of the ponds.

Having said that, prices there are obscene. No normal mortal could afford to buy in Hampstead.

The only people I know who have bought there in the last year or so have been 1. a high flying QC, 2. a BBC household name 3. someone who's family founded a high street chain 100 years ago

What is it about Hampstead that makes it so special?

I’m yet to visit but will hopefully be seeing my dsis there in the summer.

• foreign buyers

• only children inheritances from parents

• inheritances in general

• combined budgets. 2 people with 600k flats might buy the 1.2 million one

My DB doesn't live in Hampstead but paid about that for a 2-bed flat in a similar suburb of NW London.

He's a high earner who made some sound investment sections along the way.

London is teaming with people on very, very healthy incomes.

Both DD and boyfriend have flats. Combined they are worth about £1.2m. They will probably stay where their money goes further if they both sell and buy jointly. Both barristers.

Wordle - that link is not in Hampstead!

There was another thread on here about high wages and peoples income (including bonus was 400k!) top city law firms starting salary was 120k, so if 2 similarly salaried people got together and saved this might be acheivable. CEOs, barristers, top level drs (i once read that gps could earn up to 250k) hedge fund managers, stockbrokers,finance, airline pilots etc