Properties on for £800k+ not selling? Why?

[MuckyBrass]

Near me, there are loads of houses on Rightmove for around £800k, £900k, even up to £1m ish which have sat on the market for a year or two. I've long been desperate to move to a bigger house so I check Rightmove all the time, but my budget is more like £600k so I've never viewed any of them, and really I'm just being nosy. They are all lovely houses, I'd buy any of them in a heartbeat if they were on for £600k. I don't understand. Are they really for sale? Or are they just sitting on Rightmove as pretty houses to make the estate agents's rosters look good? Some of them have had their prices reduced by £100k or even more at various points, but they're still evidently not selling at the £800k plus mark.

I'm in a small (but fairly naice) market town with no train station, not an easy commute to any major city, so I actually struggle to think who would be earning enough or have the cash around here to be the actual buyers for houses in that price bracket anyway. We're not talking loads of land, either. These are normal town houses, period properties mostly, small gardens, 4-6 bedrooms.

Around 1990 you could buy 2 bed ex-council houses in the many parts of the UK for 15k or less, if you couldn"t get a mortgage the council were obliged to lend the money so council tenants could buy their properties. Not all boomers had it easy, yes mortgage rates got high, but basic houses were much much cheaper, and one wage would support a couple with kids in many cases.
No one is saying people who bought back then benefited from cheap debt (the really cheap debt came after the 2007 global collapse, but before that people were getting mortgages they should never have been offered by lying about overtime, partner"s income etc.)
The cheap debt from the 2000"s and the bailouts that followed inflated the value of the boomer"s house, but without the cheap debt it is not going to be the lottery win that many were expecting, just a nice profit if you bought in the 80"s or 90"s and can find a buyer.

I was responding to a poster who said it was cheap debt though

It wasn’t, as you say, till much later and most people who could buy would have done so well before rates came down.

I have shown therefore that the poster was wrong to make such a sweeping and inaccurate statement .

The opposite is actually true, hence the many threads and comments from boomers about not wanting to downsize, resenting paying SDLT on a new purchase, refusing to reduce their asking price, etc, etc- see current thread. I guess all these boomers are irresponsible in your eyes...
It was the previous generation that tended to downsize to flats and needed to live frugally because they had far less wealth. Indeed, many of them didn't own at all and lived in council housing their whole lives! The boomers are the wealthiest generation ever and that ever will be- see discussions wrt pensions for the young. I think most people can accept that one generation were simply exceptionally fortunate but it is irritating that so many talk about giving their children handouts, whether from their housing wealth or not, but still don't seem to understand that it is because they have been gifted this wealth by the property+/or stock market bubbles simply by being born at the right time.

Please feel free to ignore the opinion of 'a random' on the internet, but I suspect that higher end housing will be lower in another year or two. What impetus do you see within this period that might cause the market to improve?

No @BrownTroutBluesAgain. It's the cost of the houses! The other factors play a part, of course, plus the general rise in the COL, but the chief problem is the cost of the houses relative to incomes.

Your calculations create a false impression, as you have only used interest and ignored capital repayments and used the peak of mortgage interest rates for your calculations when rates fell for the whole mortgage term.

The easy way to envisage the change over time is to consider the local milkman. In the 60's/70's he could afford a semi and his wife probably didn't work.

As @rainingsnoring says, it's the prices to earnings ratio that has got out of kilter - especially in the SE. The move from single income purchases to dual income purchases, and the loosening of credit, just added fuel to the fire.

I dont. But there may be a new pool of buyers by then, families moving out of London maybe.

Interest and mortgage rates might improve. Wars might end so prices and economies might stabilise.

Or it could all get much worse. In which case we’ll stay here longer and tighten our belts, maybe let the annex. Or die here!

Depends where you live. I recently sold my old home for £785k (reduced from £800k) within two weeks of going on the market. We live in an affluent village.

I remember 15% interest rates. So many houses were repossessed, it stuffed people financially. Our monthly mortgage payment has tripled in the past 5 years but luckily we’ve been able to afford it.

I am fully aware there are many other factors to concider which is why I responded to the poster who said it was
cheap debt !!!
Nothing more. They only mentioned cheap debt!

It isn’t cheap debt as I have clearly shown
I keep repeating myself in having to remind taggers why I posted the stats if you rtft

Had the other poster mentioned other factors aswell I wouldn’t have needed to post
just on the
imaginary cheap debt

Agree
In those days there was no such thing as a mortgage holiday and no UC ( temporary ) support with them either
Pay up, sell ( if you can when no one’s buying) or get repossessed and mortgage companies didn't hang around waiting for that long either.

Many of us “boomers” who appear to be being pilloried on this thread also relied on double incomes to buy during the ‘70s. As I wrote before, we’re certainly not all wealthy in current terms.
The typical wages of the educated middle classes today are (in real terms) higher than either of us earned during our working lives, only our double income enabled us to buy.

Boomers also had to scrimp and save in many cases to get onto (and stay on) the housing ladder, no non-essential spending on holidays, new cars, gym membership, eating out etc which many regard as essentials now.

The easy way to envisage the change over time is to consider the local milkman. In the 60's/70's he could afford a semi and his wife probably didn't work.
@XVGN
I'm sorry but I have to correct you there, the milkman's wife would have been working, she would have been doing the unpaid domestic work.

Or a car at all tbh. On Our terraced street there was one car owner in the 70s when I was a kid
and everyone knew who had a TV ( on rental ) they were the houses full of the neighbours kids all watching it.

The average milkman lived in council housing round these parts

average people on single salaries didn’t buy houses - they rented council homes

milkmen, bakers, shipbuilders,

Good points.

It is not boomers who are the problem (they just got lucky, if they were downsizing, because there was a mass bailout to save bankers) the problem is (or was) greedy bankers trying to get as much secured debt out there as possible (extra BTL anyone?) and the public who were taking on mortgage debt from the early 2000`s, especially after the 2007 crash and the nonsense of Help To Bail out developers and the stamp duty scam (more help for developers)

Many folk just went crazy with the debt and helped to push property into a massive bubble, they were encouraged by endless TV programmes on the subject, many will soon have to pay the piper and don"t deserve much sympathy in my view.

The easy way to envisage the change over time is to think about banking deregulation and see a fat banker planning how to get as much debt into society as possible and how to financialise as many aspects of people"s lives as possible, then see a sheep-like public trotting to the farmer for their 30 year debt tokens.

You've obviously thought about it then rather than just assuming that things will be better in a couple of years, as so many seem to think.

I see that, thanks.
Having read the chain of posts, I think @KeepPumping's comment was in reference to older sellers assuming that younger potential buyers will be able to afford their sky high asking prices. I think he/she means that we had ZIRP for 16 years or so, which was one factor in terms of why the property market held up fairly well and that he/she thinks this is unlikely to return.

I also agree with this from @CautiousLurker2 'agree - I’ve been piled on on similar posts for suggesting that it is a little selfish for 80 year olds to be sitting in £2m five-bed houses that they cannot maintain..'
It does seem a little selfish to me, not just that these people should gift the money but simply that it isn't best overall for society to have families of 4 or 5 in cramped homes and elderly single/couples if large 5 bedroom properties with large gardens that are falling apart. It is a privilege to own these sort of properties imo, often a little piece of history, and these deserve to be properly maintained and really are meant to be lived in by a larger number of people because of the size.

I'm sure that's all absolutely true. I don't think anyone has said that all boomers earned huge salaries, didn't work hard or make lots of sacrifices, although things like package holidays, gym memberships and a wide choice of restaurants were not available and, to me, represent the pernicious over expansion of consumerism to a large extent. What the 'boomers' did have was access to affordable housing, and a huge, unearned profit from the housing boom. Many were also able to take advantage of the Right to Buy scheme, which made them £££ from nothing.

Exactly. I use the term 'debt slaves' to my DC. I'm sure many others do too. When you actually look at the total that is being on these 30/35/40 year mortgages, it seems like a less marvellous idea!

Do you mean she would have been a housewife?

Talking of downsizing vs staying put once DC have left, this thread is currently running, though I haven't read much of it yet so not sure of concensus opinion.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/property/5476910-anyone-downsized-after-the-kids-left-home

Totally agree. My In-laws bought a 3 bedroom semi as 1st time buyers on one wage without any help in the south east with a baby and toddler. This was in 1958 approximately. That wouldn’t happen now.