How do people end up living in a £1 million house?

[shortsaint]

As I do my nightly peruse (daydreaming) on Rightmove (most expensive first) I am wondering how people end up living in a million plus property?

I do not live in the south east or Home Counties, just an ordinary Midlands town. I consider myself fortunate as we come to the last couple of years of the mortgage. We probably have the lowest value house of my friends, with an above average joint income, 2 kids, both work f/t. We have had 2 houses in 20 odd years so haven't followed the property ladder, had no inheritances or windfalls. Is that what it is?

Down here in the south east, the easiest way would be to buy 30 years ago and let it gradually increase in value. Otherwise have a well paying job and a sizeable down payment.

We do, we both bought flats aged 21 ish and then sold them in our mid 30s to sizeable profit. Both in high paying jobs and had a decent deposit to put down

It can be a multitude of reasons.

Good business decisions.
Good or lucky property decisions, buying and selling at the right time.
Inheritance
Wealthy family "helping out" along the way
Happy to take risks along the way, those risks paying off.

Just some.

Live in a house that's worth nearly that. In London. We are both professionals, and bought a house nearly ten years ago for substantially less (not much more than a third) with help with deposit from family. Overpaid mortgage a lot. Area went up. Sold that house at a 50% profit after 6 years, so had big deposit for house we bought three years ago with a much bigger mortgage, in area that has gone up itself about 25% since the pandemic because of proximity to green space. So, basically, luck. I grew up in the north where it was not common to make masses of money from housing, so consider this all to be just luck of the draw. Friends on similar incomes living elsewhere in the country have far better disposable income because of the more reasonable cost of housing.

My grandparents sold an ordinary 3 bed ex council house in London in the sixties to move out to the suburbs which was the dream in working class areas at the time, that house now would be worth well in excess of a million of they'd just stayed there like some of their contemporaries have

Prices in some areas have gone up enormously. If you bought a house in a leafy London suburb 30 years ago for £200K, it could well be worth approaching a million now. I know people who bought property in London, lived in it for a couple of years then moved back up to a much cheaper area having made about £400K on the sale. But they were both solicitors and had carefully planned their careers around the moves.

My dad had a small deposit but high salary & bought the smallest (possible) property in an area where prices skyrocketed.

Bought 25 years ago in a shithole area of London. Shithole became a hipster area. House is worth ten times what we bought it for. Luck I suppose.

That luck has run out for Londoners now, though.

We are not quite there yet, but could be at the next move. We are in the SE. All thanks to house prices increasing.
Flat 1 - 100k increase
Current house - worth 200k more than we paid for it 2 years ago (we have renovated).

I bought for about 490 in the north 3 yrs ago. spent 150 on extending and works and that plus the recent boom as pushed it to £1m value.

My bil does. Double-income, no kids, stretched to buy an well-located (expensive) house 12 years ago, just gone up loads & loads since. Thought it was a stretch then, now looks like they made a good decision.

Live in a house just on London outskirts thats worth not much less. We both have goof jobs, both previously owned flats before we met. Sold them both and bought a house. It's not rocket science really. Good income, lived at home a while adding to savings, buying and selling at a good time and a bit of luck.

Here where I live it's family money, an additional rental property or being lucky enough to still be happily married to the one you met at uni - or a combination of all 3.

I'd be interested to know this too.

An acquaintance and her husband lived in a rented house until about 4 years ago. They suddenly bought a house for just under a million, did quite a bit of work to it, sold it recently for I think 1.4 million and have just moved into a 3 million pound house! No idea how they have done it. Neither are from wealthy families.

Locally (midlands) it seems to be a combo of house prices increases while paying down mortgages and two decent salaries, or an inheritance. If you spent £250k on a house in 2012 here it's probably worth £400k now and you'll have paid off nearly £100k mortgage so that's likely a £300k deposit for the next house already. Unfortunately the next houses have also gone up in price!
I grew up in London and it's madness there, so few people who bought 20 years ago could buy their house now.

We climbed the ladder.

In my late 20s I stretched myself massively to buy a two bed flat in East London for £250k. I took in a lodger for a while to help ends meet. I lived in a flat share beforehand to save the deposit.

I sold that after a few years and it had increased in value. I bought my next place for £450k in my early 30s. While living there my boyfriend who became my husband moved in with me. I sold that place for £750k in my late 30s and moved out of London to a bigger place costing the same. With hindsight I wish we had stretched ourselves a bit but I was moving jobs and we'd just had a baby so it didn't seem right at the time. If we'd stayed here we could have paid off the mortgage in our 40s but neither of us loved the house.

In our mid-40s we moved to a £1m house. So it took nearly 20 years, two good incomes and some luck with the property market.

In our case, the London market rises over the last 10 years. We’ve only moved twice but both times our property had close to doubled in value by the time we sold it (and we thought it was expensive to start with, being from northern cities originally). We now live in a nice but very ordinary family home, 15 minutes from a tube station with good links to central London. It cost us over £1m but it’s not a house I’d imagine when thinking about a million pound property at all!

I’m just about to buy one. No inheritances or windfalls here. For me it’s due to a mixture of pushing myself hard to achieve promotions (nurse), investing in a small property in a bad area when friends were going out/ spending lots on clothes, being sensible with money, house values increasing, pushing myself financially with the mortgages, and small amounts of overpaying.
So a mixture of luck & being financially savvy, e.g. reducing my current term each time even if only by a year, overpaying, not having a new car, budgeting very carefully. Obviously that is not possible for many people for lots of reasons but I haven’t been a very high earner.
I’m surprised sometimes by friends who earn a decent amount but don’t know how to budget, don’t know about mortgages, buy overpriced stuff but perhaps I’m just tight & everyone has different priorities.
I’m not in London

Vast vast majority of people in these houses bought them at a time when they simply weren't that much more expensive than 'ordinary' houses.

Excluding stuff like country estates etc obviously.

For us it was salary increases, with some savings as we did that, and in total five house moves.

Surely it's not that hard to work out.

Mixture of people having a huge variety of circumstances. It's not all due to family money.

We bought in an area of London we didn't really love - bought for £158000 sold for £255500 5 years later; bought for £385 in a slightly better place in London but with a mixed reputation near better areas and sold 7 years later for £650000; bought current place in leafy naice area for just over a million 6 years ago. Prob close to £1.4 now if we wanted to sell. Renovated all houses from dumps to best possible we could afford.

Also DH works in finance in the city so is paid extremely well. But we bought well in areas which saw significant rises - so that was down to a bit of luck/research on our part.

Buy in London in 2004 for £360,000.

We do predominantly as we live in a desirable town in the Home Counties where the prices are stupid. We bought our first house 20 years ago for 150K, 4 moves later and we bought our current one for just under a million. 8 years later and it's worth £1.4.
Absolutely bonkers and no idea how our kids are supposed to afford to live anywhere near us.

We each sold a house to buy this one, then sat back and did nothing and it's almost doubled in value in 20 years.

No help from family, the only help was a company relocation package which covered stamp duty, legal fees, survey and moving costs.

Bristol has seen crazy rises over the last decade. £200k to £800k in ten years with demand at an all time high it’s not slowing at all, multiple properties in the same postcode are going for over a million now. It’s luck. Right place right time.