Property Laddder (TV) property prices

[Kinneddar]

Just been watching series 1 of Property Ladder (2001) & good grief the house prices.

One guys ambition is to live in Notting Hill where one bedroom flats are £250k!!

Another completed project was a stunning 3 bedroom barn conversion. Huge plot, 3 bedrooms had French doors going out onto a landscaped garden. EA estimates between £170 & £200k

For both those properties you could probably add a zero to reflect today's prices.

Because today wasn’t already depressing enough.

thanks a bunch!! :’(

Shocking really - it was only 20 + years ago, Wish my salary had risen at the same rate.

It’s savage going on Rightmove and looking at the sale history of some properties.
One on an adjacent street sold for £145k in 2001. In 2021 it went for £900k. I dread to think of what their mortgage will be like if they didn’t get a long fix.
Some of the price jumps are horrific.

Our first flat in London sold for 60k, the same flat would go for about 450k now based on similar flats sold in the same street.

It was sold back in 1991 though 🤔

Property Ladder must seem so dated now though I liked it at the time. Always used to wonder why they didn’t just take the advice of “the Beeney” because she was always right. Most of the renovators made awful mistakes along the way and went way over budget ( half the fun of watching the programme, like Grand Designs).

I rewatched some of the first series of location location location a while back and there is a woman looking for a flat for £100k in London, worried she’s been left behind by the market.

There is another where a couple turn down a northern quarter loft flat for a pittance… I wonder if they regret that decision!

Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

I sometimes think - if only we could have held on to that London flat - but in reality we never could have. It took all our money to buy the next property and that seemed risky enough. No way could we have afforded 2 properties or the risk attached to letting one out.

No one knew in advance that property prices were going to rise as high as they did after the property crash of the late 80s/early 90s.

House my mum used to live in was bought in 2001 for £66,000 sold in 2021 for £230,000. I bought my house 7 years ago and it's gone up by about 50k. Feels crazy in such a short space of time

And in all that time the good people of Housepricecrash forum have been convinced the next mega-crash like the 1980s is just around the corner. Property prices are always a gamble, but all you can do is focus on what you can afford to pay, and do the best you can to find a home you are happy living in.

I did learn something of value watching this back then; the wonderful Ms Beeny (my husband and I used to call her Booby Beeny 😱😱) often pointed out it wasn't necessarily the work done but the rising market that caused the increase in prices. Was it this program that she would actually put a figure on it? Like 'if they hadn't done any work at all the property would still sell for X more that what they paid'? Hit home when I was renovating properties in the 2010s.
But hey my parents bought a lovely townhouse off the Kings Rd Chelsea for £12,500 in the 1960s. They sell for over £7m now. And that was on one young doctors salary (though like now, he did need help with the deposit from a relative )!

Totally agree. Buying a home to live in is the right approach because house prices rising or falling is always a gamble.

The house price crash forum tend to forget what happened after the property crash - prices rose again dramatically. Yes the government intervened to stimulate the market but they probably would again if necessary, rightly or wrongly.

Not to mention the market was way less regulated at the time of that crash - an example being my old boss asked me what he should put down on the form re my earnings. We were both prepared to lie very casually ( as everyone else seemed to be doing it too) & the banks did no proper checks. People overstretched themselves routinely whereas these days there are strict affordability checks.

Yes I remember the Beeney ( as we called her but BB is easier) did always point out that the property price would have risen anyway regardless of the renovations because it was a rising market. Sometimes it was made clear that people had wasted months of effort and stress because they had not effectively added any additional value to their property at all, even if they sold at an apparent profit.

I think she liked pointing that out in cases where there had completely disregarded her advice 😀

I always remember the episode (and rewatched it recently now they’re all back on all4) where two women renovated a terrace house in Derbyshire I think. One woman in particular was really quite unpleasant and totally dismissed all Sarah Beeny’s advice, doing some quite mad things to the house including sawing through a very important joist in the attic. The renovation itself was done entirely by the women and looked like absolute hell as they had to live in the house at the same time. At the end they’d made money but only because if the market - they’d have made the same amount if they’d done nothing.

What makes me even more grumpy are the houses that weren't even maintained. Not talking big renovations, redecorating etc. Just basic maintenance. Like sold in 2001 for £95k, now sold for £400k. Back then a nice house, now a dilapidated shell.

@bauchbobo yep - 20 odd years on and the same kitchen and bathroom falling to bits.

It is depressing that people I work with, in the same role I do now (so equivalent salary in real terms, I suppose) could buy a flat on their own in zone 3/4 back in the late 90s/early 00s. Meanwhile we're looking at moving out of the SE completely and commuting back down once a week, as we can't afford to stay here if we want to own our own place, and before long won't be able to afford the rents either.

Was rewatching Pulling and the main character was astounded that the house she bought with her ex in Penge was up for sale for a whole £210k. That would be more than triple the price now.

Our next door neighbours bought their (large 3 bed) semi for 80k back in the 90s. It is now worth around 600k. We, on the other hand, bought ours last year for 500k. They are mortgage free and have been able to extend on the side and the loft, re render and block pave the front. Meanwhile we have a huge mortgage and are saving to buy a dishwasher 😂😩

I can understand that is galling.

My bf at the time (now husband) and I had to use both salaries to afford a basic 1 bed flat in London with no outside space. But looking back, we were lucky to be able to afford to buy in London at all considering our jobs in the NHS & local government were not well paid. These days it seems young people have to be in very well paid jobs or have family money to be able to buy there at all.

Which was nearly every show 🙈
it was so frustrating. God knows how she felt!

I’ve watched her documentary about breast cancer and renovating her current house. Both very good.

Yup loads of houses here for 500-800k that haven’t been touched for about 30 years. Kitchens and bathrooms all need redoing. It’s a joke for that money.

The episode that always comes back to me was the guy that was filling every wall in the house with a million networking cables and sockets at vast additional expense because he was an IT guy and so convinced that the internet was the future, and those cables must have been useful for about 6 months before everyone had wi-fi.

Sarah, of course, told him only he cared enough about cables to pay extra money for them.

Yeah, I remember people doing that with iPod docks, hardwiring them into rooms and speaker set-ups at vast expense. Same with home automation systems before smart devices were invented.