Buying in a “rough” area - did it pay off for you?

[KhakiCat]

If you bought in a “rough” area of your town or city, how has it worked out years later?

Has it changed for the better?

If so, did you ever feel during the “rough” years that you made a bad decision?

I’m hoping to hear from people who bought in places that had friends saying “good God, why on earth would you buy there?!” 20-30 years ago: in London that would be Hackney, Peckham, Leytonstone, Walthamstow, Tooting, Brixton, Camden, et al.

Thanks for any experiences as starting to plan a move away from my gamble area only 9 months in…!

Not really for us - we bought in 2007 right before the big property crash and were stuck in a bad ‘up and coming’ area for about 10 years!! Lots of crime, anti social behaviour etc, it was miserable. Still, it got us on the property ladder I guess and we’re now very happily settled elsewhere.

Which area are you in?

You have to actually like living there for starters.

Me and DH spent ten years living in an area that got raised eyebrows from most people. It has a really bad reputation, but for us the benefits outweighed the disadvantages. Our neighbours were lovely, it was quiet and we lived on a tree lined street.

A 15 year old boy was murdered in a gang crime on the next road over. There were regular police "incidents" which closed the main street to traffic. Our next door neighbour didn't let her teenager out of the house after dark.

We doubled the price of our house in that ten years. But the area is probably less desirable than it was when we moved in. Down to a general shrinking of wages, increasing numbers of HMOs/landlords buying property and fewer family homes.

Bought a house in a "rough" area of major a city many years ago - not London. I hated living there and while house prices did rise I always regretted not just buying the flat in the area I wanted because those prices also rose at the same rate and I would have enjoyed living there much more. No way would I have raised children there. More than 20 years later the area is still "up and coming"..

I live in a ‘rough’ area albeit it a nicer part of a rough area.
ive lived here 22 years had I bought this house it would be worth 3 times what I could have paid for it but, that wouldn’t buy me a house in a nicer area.
The area is still rough and the surrounding area has gone worse albeit houses in my street sell very quickly, I don’t see any signs of improvement at any time in the future.

I would not recommend it. I used to own a flat in a ''regeneration'' area of East London because that was all I could afford at the time.

I did make a profit when I sold it but living there was not always a great experience. It was fine as a first property but I moved out of London to afford something in a much better and safer area.

For us, it did. 11 years now. Never regretted it, but I moved here from a very dodgy part of North London.

Pros:

• the house is bigger than we'd have afforded elsewhere. Good sized garden too.
• besides the town being a notorious 'dump', it's got an excellent train link to London, which meant...
• a year after we bought it, investment was announced. People actually travel to our town to shop now. It's not for independent stores or anything just a good collection of sought-after bargain warehouses and stores.
• our house is now worth 170k more than we paid for it.
• neighbours are lovely, despite the shouting and smoking.

Cons:

• need a car to get anywhere
• forget about sending your kid to the local secondary school if you want a half decent school experience for your child (the stats are bad vs county and national stats). We will join the many people who opt for secondary school further away.
• if you enjoy cultural activities or extracurricular activities for kids, you'll have to drive out for them, but we are surrounded by a lot of 'better' towns between 10-30mins away in all directions. Also, I love driving.
• bloody dog shit argh
• what's a corner shop?

In neither: Crime. We've been fortunate, it's a dodgy area but crime is relatively low and nothing dangerous. We have had a few attempts at break ins.

So, to conclude, we are raising our kids in a cultural dead zone, but they have turned out well because their primary school is amazing, we enjoy driving them to different towns for clubs, and the low crime rates are favourable, however, DC won't be able to go anywhere for now without me driving them, and I am having the hardest time trying to figure out secondary school options.

I bought just off Brick Lane about twenty years ago, and some of my friends were genuinely afraid to come and visit. There was a crack house a few doors away. There were sex workers along Commercial Road. Someone got stabbed literally on my doorstep. A couple of years later, the whole place changed basically overnight (a lot changed around the Olympics). Seems absolutely insane now. I loved it because it suited me when I moved in and then almost felt as if I grew up with the area, but I recognise I was insanely insanely lucky (although I did do a lot of research beforehand) and I am not sure if any London area has the potential to be regenerated like that again - it was so central and literally next door to the City, but it was also genuinely shit at the time.

We're buying in an area many would consider rough.

We have no plan B though so I hope it works out for us 😁

Our first house was in an 'interesting' area, very mixed racially, close to the local football club where there was often trouble. We had no trouble with neighbours all the very different people got on absolutely fine. We all equally hated the football hooligans. Our local corner shop was great I once got injured in a car accident and taken to hospital a long way from home our local corner shop cashed a cheque for my DH for petrol money (we were pretty broke at the time) without a question, such nice people. Just take people as you find them.

Yes.

i’m in what many would say is the roughest town in my county.

my kids are now grown up so I don’t need the schools. It could probably be more accurately described as less posh than the rest of the county and actually in many ways it’s more like where I grew up (a working class area of Lancashire).

I like it. It’s officially deprived so gets quite a lot of funding for various things and has had a new leisure centre in the last five years which runs lots of classes for various categories of disadvantaged people some of which I fall into (I’m disabled).

there’s a fair bit of crime but it’s mostly the youth being stupid (and as a small town usually someone posts the ring footage and their grandma/dad responds to say “I’ll give them a hiding”).

lots of drugs though. We have a youth worker now who’s trying to do something about it. Lots of “Don’t take cocaine it’s bad for you” posters on the local playground.

I did something very similar 25+ years but it was in a gated development (one of the first in this part of E1). I actually moved from renting in West Hampstead to owning in E1 so a huge difference between the two. I work in banking so the location between the City and Canary Wharf was/is perfect. It used to make me laugh as you could be 99% certain that anyone exiting the tube wearing a suit was probably heading for my building. 😊The area has changed massively since then. It’s still utter madness outside but now it’s a mix of hipsters, professionals and Bangladeshis with a few old East End geezers thrown in. I love it (most of the time!).

Since those early days, the value of my flat is now approx 6 times what I paid for it. It was more like 8 times until Covid hit and the market crashed. That’s life I guess. Every so often I think about moving (and have worked abroad several times during this period but always keeps my flat still) but I would struggle to find anything comparable that wasn’t a huge amount of money. I know most of my neighbours (it’s a friendly community, most unLondon-like) and lots of local businesses etc. I walk to work. In fact I can walk to pretty much everywhere I want to be from restaurants to bars to fashion shows to the Tower of London even. I don’t have to plan ahead as everything I need is on my doorstep and available pretty much 24/7 365 days a year so I’m quite spoiled. Of course the convenience and lifestyle comes at a cost. It is frequently noisy. The traffic is appalling (and the standard of driving is wild yet aggressive). It’s crowded and dirty and you need to be streetwise. There is a lot of poverty in the area and a lot of drugs and homelessness. It certainly keeps you grounded and aware what hard lives so many people have to live.

If/when I move, it will be to the countryside (which is actually where I grew up). I don’t do suburbs. 😋

Yes; I bought a flat in Peckham in ‘04 and sold that and bought a house there in ‘06. Sold the house in ‘21 for 3x what I bought it for.

Everyone said I was mad to buy there originally, but I always thought it was a decent area and couldn’t understand the pearl clutching tbh. Before that I’d rented on a v dodgy street in Brixton where I’d get accosted on a Monday morning on the way to work to buy drugs, so it’s probably all relative

We are in waltham forest, east london....it wasnt rough years ago when we moved in but a bit run down...the olympics and the parks have boosted the area. Its now full of wealthy young couples with small children and prices have rocketed however we feel its rougher now as the local high st is now full of albanian mafia cafes, vape shops, take aways, fake barbers that never have any customers. drug dealing and use has also rocketed, a bit of weed dealing is now crack cocaine, we avoid the high road in the evenings and would drive to shops which are only a 5 min walk away to avoid the beggars and weirdos that litter the road...probably move out in a few years.

I bought my first place in somewhere in East London nearly 25 years ago that many considered rough, though I didn't find it so.

That way I got a terraced house rather than a flat, and 5 minutes walk to underground, which was great. Never experienced any crime there. The overall area has gentrified slowly over the time since I bought, although the immediate area around that house is still a little behind. It's definitely a bit nicer though with a few fancier shops, hairdressers etc.

I live in an area that many consider rough in a house that a lot of people on here would consider a hovel (on street parking, only one bathroom, small back yard etc). But I'm on the property ladder as a single mum, my housing costs are manageable and one day will be mortgage and rent free. I will probably never afford to move but nor will I be at the mercy of landlords. The house has been a doer upper and is now worth about 130% of what I paid for it. The area does have its characters and issues but most problems are people who know each other - old feuds, fights over drugs/affairs/who said what about who etc. It's really rare to be randomly targeted so as long as you keep your nose out of other people's business you're fine.

Nope sorry. We bought in a slightly rough area of a Northern city. Over the 15 years we lived there it got worse. Within a 3 street radius we had several cannabis farms, a peadophile, several rapes/sexual assaults/hostage situations, 2 stabbings along with countless anti social behaviour incidents and drug and drink issues, loads of vandalism, at least one wheelie bin set on fire every bin day. It honestly got to the point where nights where we weren't woken up by either sirens or the police knocking on the door to see if we saw anything were the ones that stood out as unusual.

Obviously if an area gets identified as one for significant investment and rejuvenation it can be a good move but unfortunately some areas just get left to rot.

We did to get on the housing ladder. We did well on the buy/ sell gain only because of the year that we bought and sold the house.

Our first house we bought a 3 bed semi in a nice 60s estate in the roughest part of a low income working class northen town. Bought in 2003 for £65k, sold 3yrs later for £110k with very little spent on updated the house. If we'd have waited to sell for another year or two, the housing crash would have meant that we possibly would have been stuck there.

We did get stuck at our next property having bought in 2006 but thankfully it was in a nice area and we stayed happily until the prices rose again.

We bought in Mitcham 8 years ago now, which is generally considered to be a pretty grim part of south London. But it meant we got a 3bed house for a very affordable price. We are less than 30mins from both Wimbledon and Tooting for nicer bits of London. Our road is full of newly married couples and young families and all the kids play out together. Morden Hall Park is 10mins walk away. Northern Line at Colliers Wood is handy for the commute. Most of the time, we don't regret it! The biggest issue is actually that the location doesnt really work for us anymore - but we have access to lots of good schools and the mortgage is still very low so we are sticking it out for now and we'll reassess before we need to start thinking about secondaries for DD1. The other negative has been the increase in crime but speaking to friends elsewhere in London, that seems to be a problem in lots of bits of London so im reluctant to move just on that basis in case we go from bad to worse.

Yes, moved to what was considered a rough area in London 9yrs ago and it was getting expensive (for us at the time) then! Was the best decision we made, prices have shot up, we overpaid the mortgage, and have met some great friends.

Bought a house in inner SE London in 2009 close to a new Jubilee Line station. At the time some people questioned our judgement.

I absolutely loved living there, close to the river and easy to get to central London. Never really had any trouble. The area changed a lot over the next 10 years and we sold for double the price and moved to a larger place, still fairly central.

So yes it worked out but I don't think there are many places (in London) that well connected that are still relatively cheap. If I were buying now I'd buy on the edge of a large regeneration area or close to a new transport hub, and let investment by others do the heavy lifting.

I did this and on my third house in the same area. First one was purchased during 2012 as Crossrail was coming to the area, second one bought during the fallout of Brexit, both houses sold for a lot more than I paid them and the area has also changed in terms of the demographic although there are still plenty of crackheads around. Considering a move out of London next as I want to be by the sea!

London seems to see inexorable rises in prices, so that bad areas can only go up. That isn’t true in other parts of the country where places can stagnate for decades, or drop in desirability and even price.

Consider who the buyers typically are in the neighbourhood. Predominately rentals and first-time buyers makes an area very vulnerable to fluctuations in the market. Prices can stagnate and drop in response to government policy. Whereas in a second / third-time buyer family sort of area, prices are more stable and upward-trending because those people already have equity and choices and are choosing that area. So a little flat in area 2 is likely to see more reliable growth than a bigger house in area 1.

Have I seen ‘up and coming’ areas fail to ‘come up’ after 15-20 years? Yes. In response to (lack of expected) nearby investment and changes in interest rates, rules around rentals and mortgage availability.

And did doing this pay off for me? No. It was a terrible choice financially. A smaller place in a better neighbourhood would have worked far, far better. Convenient and served a purpose at the time but not the most sensible choice - even without hindsight.

I chose to buy a one bed flat in SW London over a 3 bed house (which I didn’t need) in SE London over 10 years ago. I don’t regret it. I loved living there and do not think I would have liked SE London.

A sibling bought a house much bigger than her needs in a crappy part of her town and is still there 6 years later, hating it and finding it difficult to sell.