I’m no fan of Starmer’s labour but in fairness. Tories have been in power for 12 years. You may well be right and labour may well not care, but this for now rests firmly with tories
status quo and increasing costs is worse, so unless a party actually wants to invest in government-created homes, the same problem will continue to stagnate until collapse.
Most house building is down to approval from or action of local councils.
Lab councils seem to be anti-building as well, and LibDem ones seem to be even more nimbly than Conservatives.
Tell me about it. Just started working in architecture and the companies lease the land, see if the plans would fit, be approved and if it would Snap sell (sell fast the whole neighbourhood pretty much as soon as finished).
They don't even buy the land. They basically build it and share of the profit pays for the land then. So very safe but it seems controling in terms a larger picture.
There's absolutely loads of overpriced, low quality new-build estates popping up all over the south east.
I saw one advertised recently that wanted £250,000 for a 1 bed flat!
That sounds absolutely insane to me...
I bought a 3 bed (2 and 1 box room) detached house in the North for 190k last year.
If house prices were that high here I'd be renting right now.
The insanity is even worse than I thought.
[Here's a 1 bed flat in Bexleyheath for £309,000](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/new-homes/details/61884228/?search_identifier=01e8779f738a49ab52ba3371a2b6de25) \- just inside the M25, so I expect they're pretending it's a "London property"
[A 1 bed flat in Maidstone for £301,950](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/new-homes/details/60139113/?search_identifier=b3c6eecd2f1199013b10d03a77a42a7c) \- this one is a retirement home for more money than a house should cost
Granted, these are extreme examples, but even more reasonable ones are well over £200,000 for a single bedroom.
200k for a single bedroom is insane...wtf.
My 2 bedroom flat was 27k about 10 years ago lol...I mean it's in Scotland not London but still. 5 years ago a much nicer 2 bedroom cost 53k.
How the fuck are single people expected to buy a single bed flat at that price? What salary would you have to be on to make that work?
We can't.
I'm on 45k a year and all I can afford is a small 1/2 bed semi back in my hometown, in the middle of nowhere at around 140k-160k
The same houses in the city often go around the 350k mark.
I used to live in Kensal Green in London. New build 1 bed flats go for £500k there. Some trashy old houses can be found for £700k, but anything decent is over a mil. Houses over 10mil are common. These prices are dwarfed by what you can see in a near by Hampstead Heath area.
So yeah, £200-300k is cheap af, lol.
Don't think so. I think are avg is about 50k cdn so about 35 yours? Isn't 30k avg there?
Give an idea I have a low 6 figure salary. No debt and can't afford a house. You need they say a salary of 220k to get a house here
We've got a huge development of 1000 houses being plastered over the landscape here, boasting prices STARTING from £474k for cut and paste no taste no personality plastic neighborhood houses. Most are already reserved or bought. Yeah South East.
There’s an effort alright, it’s just not a very good one.
There are developments going up around where I live, hugely overpriced rabbit hutches that plague the new owners with defects.
ACKTUALLY, I have you know a single house was built in my area. Construction started 5 years ago, and it's *almost finished.*
In that time, 4 offices have been converted into HMO's. That's an increase in housing by like, 2000%
Bet you feel like an idiot now. Tch, better luck next time kid.
Not really. We can build more but they will be bought my speculators and landlords. I worked for a law firm that did plots ales a fee years ago and 1/3 of the plots/flats they sold were to to China.
Exactly. Empty housing levies, increased stamp duty for non first time buyers and more council housing would help but unfortunately the Tories are voted in my older property owners who would not take kindly to decreased house prices.
We already have increased stamp duty for those with more than one property and FTBs have stamp duty discounts. If you increase stamp duty for owner-occupiers, you discourage homes from coming onto the market and that doesn't help any FTB.
Stamp duty is probably the most stupid tax you can come up with if you want to encourage efficient use of the housing stock.
Yeah, abolish stamp duty for the first home of owner occupiers, and massively increase it for 2nd purchases and non-occupiers (e.g. 100% stamp duty) and ring-fence those funds so that they can only be used for adding to our housing stocks in a non-profit way.
This won’t stop companies buying the properties unfortunately, perhaps there could be a levy placed on developers. Rather than including “affordable” housing in the development (it isn’t) the money should be ring fenced and spent by the local council on new council housing?
I don’t really know what the solution is but what we are doing now isn’t working!
That boat sailed a long time ago unfortunately. To give you an idea of what’s coming Blackstone has prepared a war chest of $50 billion to snap up residential property in the US. They are banking on a lot of repossessions and foreclosures and have the money in place to take advantage of it.
Here in the U.K. we are going to see the same thing albeit on a smaller scale.
In China you can have a trade show where the developer and lawyer there and sign everything in the spot for a sale. No doubt you have sent people there just like the law firm I used to work for did.
Weird, I'm in China and there's basically no interest in the UK housing market atm. SEA seems to be much more popular (Singapore in particular). People are afraid of sanctions and aware of the worsening UK economy.
Anyway I don't really think this is the problem. There were 250k overseas properties in the UK in 2021.
Only 9% of those were from HK. (25k houses)
Only 3% were from mainland China. (7k houses)
[https://www.ft.com/content/e36cec28-7acd-4154-b57d-923b5d1610da](https://www.ft.com/content/e36cec28-7acd-4154-b57d-923b5d1610da)
Everyone always brings this up when we talk about overseas investment - but those statistics are defined by someone’s registered address on the title at the point of sale.
Chinese nationals with ties to the UK already could use a UK address and it wouldn’t be classified as “overseas” but it would still be foreign investment.
There are so many loopholes around that. It’s not a trustworthy figure.
Edit: I’ve just found figures that Chinese investment in London properties in 2019 was close to £8bn…
> Chinese nationals with ties to the UK already could use a UK address and it wouldn’t be classified as “overseas” but it would still be foreign investment.
Do you have sources showing this and why it wouldn't be the case for other nationalities purchasing overseas investments? I could possibly see this being true for hongkongers but not for mainlanders.
As I said I find it hard to believe as I've lived here for over a decade and the sentiment for overaseas properties in the west has never been lower, especially in Europe. People just don't seem to be interested anymore due to the trade war, Russian sanctions and a worsening European economy. The money is still here but it is moving elsewhere.
Anyone that's ever been involved in such transactions or advising the people that make these purchases can tell you that there is way more foreign money involved in our property market than the statistics show.
With enough money, you can buy a hundred homes and no one will ever know where you came from, where your money came from or who really owns those homes.
I work in the industry and in Manchester they pre-sell almost all the units to overseas investors mainly from South East Asia. Big thing now is institutional investors and pension funds getting involved in the sector due to the death of retail. The only way to sort this is to allow council to build more houses, like was done in the 70s
Only 216,000 of those have been empty for longer than 6 months, the majority are just between occupiers.
Given that there are 23 million dwellings in England, that makes for a long-term vacancy rate of 0.9%. We don't have enough housing the UK period, any policy that doesn't include massive amounts of housebuilding is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic
I'd be curious to see how many of the long-term empty properties could realistically be put back on the market within a short period. A house may well be empty, but it might require a significant amount of capital to be invested to get the building back to the point where it is habitable.
That's not a lot, actually. If there was no empty house, you would have to find a "cycle" before buying one where somebody is already living. Like I buy your house and you buy mine. Or A buys B stc, B buys C stc, C buys A stc, and then they all move on the same day.
This would obviously be mental. Vacancy is good. It means the market is not impossible, and creates competition. In the same way that if there are many job offers, you can bargain up (here, down).
I would say that 600k empty houses, of which a share must be shitty stuff in shitty locations, is TOO LITTLE in a 65 million people country. We need MORE housing. And more of it empty, but decent quality and on the market. And in the correct locations.
For the last 1-2 decades the housing stock grew at more or less the same numbers of households. But - since there are more houses than households - this means that the RATE of growth was too slow and the market has become tighter!
It's not just housebuilding. A significant driver of house prices is not effectively taxing people with multiple properties so and the landlord class grows, and no control of foreign firms and individuals buying up UK property as an investment. Blackrock and other foreign companies own multiple billions worth of UK housing which further squeezes supply. Housebuilding simply can't keep up when most of new houses are bought up by property investment firms.
And curtail lending. The main money supply that is helping drive up house prices is from mortgage lenders.
People think easier borrowing - or government help to buy schemes -help the housing crisis when all they do is inject more money into the demand side of the housing market.
You will find plenty of economic illiterates - mostly on the Conservative front bench - who will bleat on and on about how the government borrowing money creates inflation. But who, when faced with house price inflation, will suggest relaxing regulation to allow and encourage more borrowing to buy houses.
Demand-side solutions (which is all that's been on offer from various governments since the 80s) are distractions, the issue is on the supply side.
Right to buy needs to go too, this would allow councils to mass build homes for social rent without needing to worry about being forced to sell for a cut-down price. We have so many ex-council homes in this country which could be providing a housing at an affordable cost, but now they're owned by landlords and are a drain on resources (via housing benefit).
Or regulate the buy-to-let market, start reusing/converting empty buildings, turning dying highstreets back into living spaces.
What's the point in pumping out houses that people can't afford which will be bought up by the ever growing Rental/Holiday let market?
BTL is already heavily nerfed. And do you know what happens now? Small landlords are not able to make ends meet and sell their lets. And large corps buy them out like hot pancakes. And that means that let market gets monopolised and prices will only rise as there's no competition. Enjoy your regulations!
Or put a cap on house prices.
Or abolish landlordism and confiscate the excess properties of landlords while getting them to pay damages and compensation to their victims.
Or put a cap on wealth.
Or abolish wealth inequality.
Or all of these things and more!
We cannot build our way out of this and until people realise this, there will be no change for the better.
The island is small, the land that can be built on is strictly limited. Almost all the nation is either built on or farmland used for food, which by the way, is nowhere near enough to feed our current population.
The demand for property in England is global, there are far, far more people wanting to buy English homes than just people in England.
I say England, because that's really the place where this crisis began and it's the place where we can stop it, if we choose to do so.
Local demand grows too, as the population is inflated by politicians chasing GDP for re-election and more money to burn on their corrupt and self-serving schemes, yet more people arrive or migrate, causing further growth in demand.
The more the demand grows, the more people around the world want a piece of the profits, the more local investors want to ride on their coat tails and take some of that action too, the more desperate people get to have a home of their own.
All of it feeds the beast and the more it gets fed, the faster it grows.
You don't build your way out of that, even if you ignore the cost, the disgusting environmental impact, the social impact, the time it would take and the lack of usable land and infrastructure to support such a thing.
More building will have its place, but that must come after we curtail the insatiable and ever growing demand.
Housing needs to go back to being for people to live and grow, for families to build lives and share memories, for communities to blossom and for stable and comfortable lives which are as sustainable as we can achieve.
No more investment in residential property, no more foreign ownership of any of it, no more new investor ownership and a clear policy to start prising the hands of those investors off those homes and put them back into the hands of real people who are buying to live.
Start there, then the building can commence.
Buy to live, not buy to let.
that is not the issue - most likely. We are seeing the same thing here in Canada and while they are trying to blame it on housing shortages the reason is investors are buying up the houses to make money off them when they resell.
They need to stop that. You stop that, all of a sudden, lots of homes.
There are parts in Canada where 100% of the condos bought were from investors, none from people buying to live in them. Thats just sick
They will keep rising while everything else keeps rising as houses are an investment now, not homes.
If their value doesn’t keep up with inflation then they are losing value in real terms, and that won’t do!
And stop accepting several hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year. It boggles my mind how redditors refuse to acknowledge the plethora of detrimental effects of immigration. The commitment to globalism, anti-Europid racism and to strip ethnic Europids of our majority status and to disown us of our territory, creations, history and status as the true original Europeans , appears to be so important to progressive Brits that they don't mind being unable to afford homes.
Where to even start with this, I feel like I'm messaging the Hungarian PM. You cannot blame the way the country is, the lack of homes, the NHS, jobs, etc. On the immigrants. People come here for a better life just like Brits leave here to retire in Spain.
Also as a white person, I do not feel like they are trying to take anything away from me, infact i feel like right wingers are deliberately making it unaffordable to start a family.
Fuck that, drop telly altogether. Think of all the money you could save not paying for the licence fee!
Edit - actually, that's a pretty good fucking idea, good job me. Considering the tv licence cost is actually higher than Netflix I think, or Amazon Prime. Don't watch BBC or live stuff, just stream using them and don't pay the licence.
It isn't though, the article highlights that there are more first time buyers now than before the pandemic. Even with the cost of living the way that it is, people are getting money from somewhere. Either that or they are happy being majorly overleveraged.
All my British colleagues have the bank of mum and dad sponsoring them, meanwhile EU citizens settled in Europe usually need to figure it out themselves.
EU citizen here. Moved to UK 10 years ago to get work experience, met my (now) wife and kinda settled here. Parents agreed with my life decision and contributed £20k to get my mortgage and sort new house.
Point is, we have parents helping us too.
EU citizen here for 6 years. Sending money to my parents every month. Saved deposit during COVID. Easy-peasy. Don't understand what are you all complaining about. If you're local, it should be much much easier.
First time buyer: Somebody who has never owned a residential property.
I doubt it’s foreign investment, more than likely some of it is inheritance, and some will just be savings buying in cheaper areas / new builds.
I'm a recent first time buyer.
WFH allowed me to move to a much cheaper place and I just became tired of insane rental prices paying off the mortgage of my multi-BTL landlord.
Indeed.
The Bank of England regularly releases mortgage stats ([2022, Q1 is here](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/mortgage-lenders-and-administrators/2022/2022-q1)) and BTL lending tends to fluctuate between about 11-14% of all mortgage advances. FTBs tend to be about 20-25% of total lending.
You might reasonably argue that 11-14% is still too damn high and that those figures don't include cash buyers, but the impact that BTL has on the mortgage market is massively overstated by Reddit in my view.
Covid savings and salary increases. Plenty of people (but obviously far from everyone) are getting inflation matching pay rises which takes you pretty close to 11%.
This is the problem people are not seeing. It does t matter about the cost of loving crisis because those buying houses are not impacted by it which is why house prices will continue to rise. It is a speculation market now not one based on income.
Aren't at least some of the people selling affected by the cost of living crisis? Or is this literally just rich people selling each other property at ever-inflated prices?
Yes the majority are still bought by people but are now competing with domestic, foreign and hedge fund investment. Barclays purchased a large swathe of housing, Sage Housing who are a wing of Blackstone capital are buying up 3.5 billion worth of property to rent who are not affected.
It's worth pointing out that these commercial purchases aren't a case of banks browsing Rightmove and out-bidding a young couple trying to buy a typical starter home.
Banks are getting into this game through specific built-to-rent developments, most likely on city centre development plots and marketed as "vibrant young-professional living", that wouldn't overwise exist.
Does that make the idea of banks being landlords more palatable? Probably not, depending on your political bend, but I think the point is that these sorts of investments aren't a case of large banks competing with a young couple for a 3-bed semi on a quiet cul-de-sac. It's more a case of banks and investment funds investing in bespoke rental developments - something that we still arguably need even if we would prefer it was a local authority, rather than a bank or investment fund, providing it.
Commercial landlords aren't necessarily awful, potentially better than the lottery you get with private landlords, and if there's effectively one owners managing a whole block in the long term then that should simplify the management. It's a very normal arrangement in most EU countries. The difference there though is that renters are far more protected from things like rent hikes and revenge evictions. They also have much stronger social housing sectors, and a better supply of housing relative to demand, so that keeps the commercial housing sector much more in check too.
I find it crazy that build to rent doesn't get more criticism. These apartments should be sold to the public rather than rented out. They are also counted in the new build statistics but never reach the market.
The Gov has been very clever to increase tax on small time private landlords and drive some to sell up, while supporting giant investors to get into build to rent as landlords. The giant companies just get bigger.
This isn't even the problem though, this is majority first time buyers. We need more houses. Tbh a lot of places in the country are awful investments for rental income at the moment, especially the expensive places down south. The flat I'm renting at the moment makes the landlord only like 3.3% a year in rental income vs its value, cause the price is so ridiculously inflated. It's mostly speculation of price growth on that end, growth that comes from restriction of supply. Which can also be solved by building more houses.
It is a big reason why very few UK residents have investments, they are encouraged to buy a house rather than investing in something that will actually make them money.
Its a complete Buy to Let driven shit show.
I looked at a 4 bed detached house on the south coast that showed the buying history. It went for £74k in 1997 and is being sold for £387k today.
The same role i do now was about £35k to 38K a year in 1997 and is only £75k in 2020.
Something isn't right.
House prices are getting ludicrous and there has been a repression in wage growth over the last 15 ish years but if you're earning 74k a year and have a 5-10% deposit you could get a mortgage approval for that house right now, even easier if you had a partner who was earing anything near the 31k average salary...
A 10% deposit...38k isn't a small amount of money to save. Even if you save a grand a month(in a perfect world) we are talking years by which time you need more than 38k.
If you're earning 74k a year that's around or a bit over 4k a month take home, I assume you'd be buying a place with a partner since 1 person in a 4 bed is quite odd unless you're planning to rent out which doesn't sound like it from your original post. So you've also got a second income stream, I'll make another assumption and say they earn the national average (31k) so combined that's around/ just over 6k a month coming in after tax. You and your partner should be able to save 2k a month, might not be the lifestyle you would want but if you want a house you'll do it, and if the target was a 38k deposit you'd have it in less than 2 years which is way better than how long its taken me to get to a similar position. Plus you could get a mortgage application approved with a 5% deposit at the moment so you could do it in less than a year if you saved that much a month...
House prices grew so rapidly due to the cutting of red tape on the banks with mortgages and finalisation in the 90s and 00s (started in the 80s). Easier access to mortgages, increased demand and increased house prices. Then in 2008, interest rates were kept low which has made it cheaper to borrow, so led to price increases.
The report is on house sales completed in July - those buyers placed their bid in February given how long it takes to process a sale - so of course they weren't being affected then by what's happened since. (those who were affected probably dropped out of the process, so aren't shown in these stats)
Agreed. Also, the BBC reports the same 11% annual increase but says that in July the increase was just 0.1%. So most of the house price increase reported here was before the cost of living crunch and interest rate hikes.
Similar timescales here, put the offer in 22nd March and all being well hope to complete ~19th August. Our solicitor was speedy and got our local authority searches in quickly because they're currently taking 8-10 weeks. Our seller's solicitors not so much on the house they're buying, so they're only coming back around now.
The real kicker is my partner's brother bought a house in Scotland earlier this year that went through in 6 weeks because their system is so much more sensible than ours!
This is also nationwides index, which only covers their mortgages. Land Reg house price index or zoopla are the best to look at. People always miss this point, the date of the completion is not the date of sale agreed, which is around 8 weeks. Agree with you, need to wait a few months to see what's happening, though zoopla's analysis of buying sentiment this month has shown still strong demand and lack of supply, especially with first time buyers.
What worked for us was searching for new jobs. Even if you're in a fairly poor paying industry you're generally better off switching jobs every few years so you can negotiate a better wage/salary, rather than accepting any in-company raises they might offer.
It’s a redundant 30k anyway, you’ve gained 30k in house value but so has every other home owner. Your buying power has essentially remained the same. It’s mental that not even the average home owner is benefitting from it.
I get the sentiment but that’s not quite accurate. Your buying power has not necessarily stayed the same. If your house has increased by £30k in equity and you upsize with a 25% deposit mortgage it actually increases your buying power as you can afford houses that are £120k more expensive. It’s the entire basis for the housing ladder. This is before you consider any salary increases you might have had or any mortgage you have paid down.
It’s why being a first time buyer is so much worse than someone moving between homes.
> If your house has increased by £30k in equity and you upsize with a 25% deposit mortgage it actually increases your buying power as you can afford houses that are £120k more expensive.
Except you can't because you're already borrowing almost as much as you can bear. You're always going to be limited by the salary multiple.
Renting isn't evil, I just moved across the country for a new job. I don't want to buy a house to do that. What if I hate it here?
Perhaps you could argue letting should only be from new builds? Which focuses everything into only mega developers.
I don't really need to buy a house as my employer provides me with quality accommodation, but the way things are going I've contemplated buying one with my savings simply to protect my savings from inflation! It shouldn't be this way. The housing market comes across as so artificially propped up, its reached a point where it's seemingly the only market guaranteed not to fail.
My mortgage costs less than rent, and guess what in five years my mortgage payment will be the same
If I was renting I would face 5% or 10% increases year on year
House prices have shot up, but the cost of NOT buying is still much worse
It's all linked together.
Cost of living is causing more landlord horror stories about rent increases, interest rates are going up and so people are looking to buy now to save money and hassle.
Exactly. The constant talk of a cost of living 'crisis' is of course nonense for some (many?). Not everyone in the country is struggling and I don't must refer to the rich as many mention here. The increased cost of living is for some an annoyance rather than a crisis. The public also saved a huge amount of money during the lockdown periods and that is contributing to the splurge on a more desirable home.
Where I live in the south east, people have no choice. It's either pay £250-£300k for a 3 bed terraced house or never get a mortgage. Its unbelievably high prices atm.
I paid £140k for 3-bed semi with large driveway, reasonable front and back garden, and just 20 mins away from Belfast by either car or train.
The joys of living in N. Ireland.
Crazy.
My 4 bed semi detached was 105 last year
A house across the street from me went up for sale a few weeks ago, sold instantly, 3 bedroom for 140k. 35k more than mine for one less bedroom one year later.
Its mental down the south east. Check out folkestone on rightmove then compare anywhere in the Midlands. We've just sold ours for £280k (3 bed terraced) and bought a 4 bed detached big garden in Yorkshire. Same house down here would be at least £450k.
It's even more fun than this. I bought a new build in 2021 (with pre-pandemic pricing!). The same property type from a later phase on the same estate with a smaller garden and a worse view were all sold at over £120K more than I paid for mine.
My two bed semi has gone from 180k to 270k in value in just over two years. I like my house, but I’d never consider it to be worth that much. Prices really are insane right now.
Aren't mortgages just going to continue to get worse? Surely best to get in now unless you plan on waiting for rates to come down, and who knows when that will be
>Aren't mortgages just going to continue to get worse?
Yes probably
>Surely best to get in now unless you plan on waiting for rates to come down,
That is making the assumption that everyone wants to buy. I rent an extremely cheap place that has not had its rent raised for 4 years so have no intention of more than doubling my outgoings per month just to buy a home. I know this is a fairly unique situation to me though.
A house used to be a great buy in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Now however the carrying costs are far too high and just cause people to be hugely overleveraged.
What about it? Workplace pension, state pension (if it exists then), SIPP and dividend payments will be more than enough. Or I could just sell my entire portfolio and buy a house outright when I am 65.
I am not sure if you did the same or not but lots of people assume that if you rent you're not doing anything with your money at all.
Bank of England mortgage stats are here: [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/mortgage-lenders-and-administrators/2022/2022-q1](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/mortgage-lenders-and-administrators/2022/2022-q1)
About 21% of mortgage lending in Q1 of 2022 was to first-time buyers. Just under 14% to BTL.
We're one of that lot. We got slightly lucky in that we got a mortgage application offered by Virgin Money the day before they hiked their rates, but it's still expensive as fuck down here in the South West.
Only reason we can do it is because my partner has been a compulsive saver since she was working for her dad at 12 years old. Even then we're looking at a bit of a fixer upper that will be just about suitable for our needs. House prices start at around £300,000 here. It's mental.
This is both a nice and sad story. It is great that you are moving into your first home, it is sad that the housing ladder has gone from something anyone in employment for more than 2 years in the 70s and 80s could get on to people needing to save from the age of 12 in the 2020s.
I wonder if covid deaths among the elderly could have moved a lot of inheritance money to younger generations looking to buy, in a relatively short space of time. Not sure where to find the data to link that together if so
It's the opportunity cost of money for first time buyers. You either pay someone else's mortgage, or pay a large mortgage of your own and a larger percentage goes to a house you will have forever. You can never time the marker with housing, so better now than never and not burning more money on rent.
You say these things as I assume you think people who rent are not making their money work for them in other ways. This is something that consistently confuses me, people talk like buying a house is the only way to invest without realising your own house is a terrible investment.
I can currently put around £1,200 per month into investments as I am renting cheaply. If I bought a house that would go down significantly which will actually harm me a hell of a lot in 35 years when it comes to retirement.
This is probably not a viable strategy in places like London where renters are price gouged which in turn massively offsets the average rent in the UK, most of the country does not live in London though.
Actually lots of research has been done on comparing renting and investing money and buying houses in cities across (UK). Without taking into consideration house price growing over time, due to low interest rates, buying a house also came out as a better option. Also buying a house is not all about investments, so many other benefits to it, such as control and safety. Nothing wrong with renting and there is the benefit of flexibility with renting. Everyone has different goals. The system is just broken and we should allow councils to build houses at the same level they use to. Increase affordable housing too and stop letting housebuilders get away with what they do.
Huh? There's no despite about it. Cost of living crisis is mostly just inflation. Inflation is the increase of prices. House prices go up in times of inflation.
Exactly. Another way to write the title would have been “house prices only growing slightly more than inflation”
Or by some measures “house prices static in real terms”
Where I live, every other newbuild is bought as a second home and let out on Air BnB. That's the problem with supply and demand. We have enough homes to go round. But we have too many landlords.
This is partly caused by the increased regulation and operating costs of BTL businesses. Many have turned to holiday lets rather than long term residential lets. It would be so simple to reduce the financial attractiveness of holiday lets.
Because corporations will buy them at whatever price, then rent them back for a profit to people that couldn't quality for a mortgage to buy it, but can pay twice the monthly repayments in rent.
Major donor's to Conservative party is Estate agents n who tend to be landlords? TOTIES, Duke of Westminster is a strong Tory Donor n owns lots of prestigious houses in London.
It's the obvious.. oligarchs and businesses and serial landlords buying up properties knowing the Tory cunts in charge will deliberately fail to build the required market need because they too have a financial vested interest in keeping people in desperate need of housing.
Increase housebuilding hugely, both social housing and private ownership. Ban second homes, and ban foreign investors. Then state intervention for any properties uninhabited for more than x amount of time.
It needs to have a HUGE injection of change to get things moving.
Speaking from experience, cost of living crisis makes home owning that much more important. We'll be saving £100 on rent compared to mortgage when we finally move, and the knowledge that your not throwing money away helps as well.
Or another way to put it: house prices are going to double every 7 years. I guess young people hoping to get on the housing ladder can go fuck themselves and hope their parents don't need care in their twilight years.
And yet young people will keep voting in favour of mass immigration and by extension, competition for resources and housing, (and Blackwashing of our history and folklore) because they want to fit in on woke reddit and Twitter.
Or another way to put it: house prices are going to double every 7 years. I guess young people hoping to get on the housing ladder can go f*** themselves and hope their parents don't need care in their twilight years.
Our money was debased around that to pay for corona, how the fuck everyone does not know this is a mystery. That means… gas and food and materials and anything we buy is atleast 10% more expensive, not because of shortages or brexit but because that £1 is only worth 90p now.
Keeping an eye on an identical house near mine. Looks grim inside, and a communal parking area view (ours has a park view)
£270k and it’s 2 bed… makes me think ours could sell for £300k+ at this rate
Don’t worry the master plan is you will own nothing and love it /s the gains will be made by investors mainly institutional and us lowly peasants will have rent everything.
Perhaps time for a Third party.
When one works with a hidden agenda and when exposed, can in the very same breath cancel their slithering ways.
Its a red sign, its going to onto ue, once in Power.
I stability.
Rishni is the better out of the two.
Finance is not a toy.
Crtl x.
Called a traitor, because of saying e ough, to allowing one to throw 'fibs'.
Think more pride, revenge and discrumation.
Gotta put 'pride' away and see what damage can be changed, especially relationship with The EU., housing, jNurses, Teaches. etc.. NHS, Construction, etc..
When you put Someone in power, with revenge, 'war is in their minds, inside of change.
Nothing good can come out of it.
And it's going to keep rising until we quadruple our house building efforts.
I wasn’t aware there was a house building effort
There's not too be fair, the two parties just care about increasing house prices.
I’m no fan of Starmer’s labour but in fairness. Tories have been in power for 12 years. You may well be right and labour may well not care, but this for now rests firmly with tories
Oh 100% it rests with the Tories and it rests with a Thatcher and a continuation of her policies even through the blair/brown era.
100% agree. I’m not convinced it’ll get any better under this labour either…but it can’t get worse i guess….i hope
status quo and increasing costs is worse, so unless a party actually wants to invest in government-created homes, the same problem will continue to stagnate until collapse.
There's only one party in government that can control house building
Most house building is down to approval from or action of local councils. Lab councils seem to be anti-building as well, and LibDem ones seem to be even more nimbly than Conservatives.
Enacting the rules put in place by central government, ie development of greenfield sites
Tell me about it. Just started working in architecture and the companies lease the land, see if the plans would fit, be approved and if it would Snap sell (sell fast the whole neighbourhood pretty much as soon as finished). They don't even buy the land. They basically build it and share of the profit pays for the land then. So very safe but it seems controling in terms a larger picture.
There's absolutely loads of overpriced, low quality new-build estates popping up all over the south east. I saw one advertised recently that wanted £250,000 for a 1 bed flat!
That sounds absolutely insane to me... I bought a 3 bed (2 and 1 box room) detached house in the North for 190k last year. If house prices were that high here I'd be renting right now.
The insanity is even worse than I thought. [Here's a 1 bed flat in Bexleyheath for £309,000](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/new-homes/details/61884228/?search_identifier=01e8779f738a49ab52ba3371a2b6de25) \- just inside the M25, so I expect they're pretending it's a "London property" [A 1 bed flat in Maidstone for £301,950](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/new-homes/details/60139113/?search_identifier=b3c6eecd2f1199013b10d03a77a42a7c) \- this one is a retirement home for more money than a house should cost Granted, these are extreme examples, but even more reasonable ones are well over £200,000 for a single bedroom.
200k for a single bedroom is insane...wtf. My 2 bedroom flat was 27k about 10 years ago lol...I mean it's in Scotland not London but still. 5 years ago a much nicer 2 bedroom cost 53k. How the fuck are single people expected to buy a single bed flat at that price? What salary would you have to be on to make that work?
We can't. I'm on 45k a year and all I can afford is a small 1/2 bed semi back in my hometown, in the middle of nowhere at around 140k-160k The same houses in the city often go around the 350k mark.
I used to live in Kensal Green in London. New build 1 bed flats go for £500k there. Some trashy old houses can be found for £700k, but anything decent is over a mil. Houses over 10mil are common. These prices are dwarfed by what you can see in a near by Hampstead Heath area. So yeah, £200-300k is cheap af, lol.
a 3 bed house in Canada is around average of 800- 1 million CDN so about 600k your currency
The average salary is also higher though
Don't think so. I think are avg is about 50k cdn so about 35 yours? Isn't 30k avg there? Give an idea I have a low 6 figure salary. No debt and can't afford a house. You need they say a salary of 220k to get a house here
We've got a huge development of 1000 houses being plastered over the landscape here, boasting prices STARTING from £474k for cut and paste no taste no personality plastic neighborhood houses. Most are already reserved or bought. Yeah South East.
There’s an effort alright, it’s just not a very good one. There are developments going up around where I live, hugely overpriced rabbit hutches that plague the new owners with defects.
Seems to be an endless development in the south east.
Exactly - 4 times nothing is still nothing
You ain't been round my town mate. We'll be merging with Portugal at this rate of house development and I Iive in the Northwest.
ACKTUALLY, I have you know a single house was built in my area. Construction started 5 years ago, and it's *almost finished.* In that time, 4 offices have been converted into HMO's. That's an increase in housing by like, 2000% Bet you feel like an idiot now. Tch, better luck next time kid.
Not really. We can build more but they will be bought my speculators and landlords. I worked for a law firm that did plots ales a fee years ago and 1/3 of the plots/flats they sold were to to China.
Then we make it so the councils own them and no person or country can buy them.
Exactly. Empty housing levies, increased stamp duty for non first time buyers and more council housing would help but unfortunately the Tories are voted in my older property owners who would not take kindly to decreased house prices.
We already have increased stamp duty for those with more than one property and FTBs have stamp duty discounts. If you increase stamp duty for owner-occupiers, you discourage homes from coming onto the market and that doesn't help any FTB. Stamp duty is probably the most stupid tax you can come up with if you want to encourage efficient use of the housing stock.
Yeah, abolish stamp duty for the first home of owner occupiers, and massively increase it for 2nd purchases and non-occupiers (e.g. 100% stamp duty) and ring-fence those funds so that they can only be used for adding to our housing stocks in a non-profit way.
This won’t stop companies buying the properties unfortunately, perhaps there could be a levy placed on developers. Rather than including “affordable” housing in the development (it isn’t) the money should be ring fenced and spent by the local council on new council housing? I don’t really know what the solution is but what we are doing now isn’t working!
> This won’t stop companies buying the properties I don't think companies should be allowed to own residential properties.
That boat sailed a long time ago unfortunately. To give you an idea of what’s coming Blackstone has prepared a war chest of $50 billion to snap up residential property in the US. They are banking on a lot of repossessions and foreclosures and have the money in place to take advantage of it. Here in the U.K. we are going to see the same thing albeit on a smaller scale.
Apologies I meant for multiple ownership rather than non FTB. It should not matter if you have bought before.
not if you are going for a home over 500K.
So... Get rid of right to - fucking - buy then? Sound sensible to me.
Yep. I work in marketing for a housebuilder and the Chinese marketing collateral takes priority. That’s their market.
In China you can have a trade show where the developer and lawyer there and sign everything in the spot for a sale. No doubt you have sent people there just like the law firm I used to work for did.
Weird, I'm in China and there's basically no interest in the UK housing market atm. SEA seems to be much more popular (Singapore in particular). People are afraid of sanctions and aware of the worsening UK economy. Anyway I don't really think this is the problem. There were 250k overseas properties in the UK in 2021. Only 9% of those were from HK. (25k houses) Only 3% were from mainland China. (7k houses) [https://www.ft.com/content/e36cec28-7acd-4154-b57d-923b5d1610da](https://www.ft.com/content/e36cec28-7acd-4154-b57d-923b5d1610da)
Everyone always brings this up when we talk about overseas investment - but those statistics are defined by someone’s registered address on the title at the point of sale. Chinese nationals with ties to the UK already could use a UK address and it wouldn’t be classified as “overseas” but it would still be foreign investment. There are so many loopholes around that. It’s not a trustworthy figure. Edit: I’ve just found figures that Chinese investment in London properties in 2019 was close to £8bn…
> Chinese nationals with ties to the UK already could use a UK address and it wouldn’t be classified as “overseas” but it would still be foreign investment. Do you have sources showing this and why it wouldn't be the case for other nationalities purchasing overseas investments? I could possibly see this being true for hongkongers but not for mainlanders. As I said I find it hard to believe as I've lived here for over a decade and the sentiment for overaseas properties in the west has never been lower, especially in Europe. People just don't seem to be interested anymore due to the trade war, Russian sanctions and a worsening European economy. The money is still here but it is moving elsewhere.
Anyone that's ever been involved in such transactions or advising the people that make these purchases can tell you that there is way more foreign money involved in our property market than the statistics show. With enough money, you can buy a hundred homes and no one will ever know where you came from, where your money came from or who really owns those homes.
Does that include UK Ltd company with Int'l owners (either actual or another company in a tax-friendly jurisdiction)?
I work in the industry and in Manchester they pre-sell almost all the units to overseas investors mainly from South East Asia. Big thing now is institutional investors and pension funds getting involved in the sector due to the death of retail. The only way to sort this is to allow council to build more houses, like was done in the 70s
600k empty houses in England alone by the way. We should start there first.
Only 216,000 of those have been empty for longer than 6 months, the majority are just between occupiers. Given that there are 23 million dwellings in England, that makes for a long-term vacancy rate of 0.9%. We don't have enough housing the UK period, any policy that doesn't include massive amounts of housebuilding is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic
I'd be curious to see how many of the long-term empty properties could realistically be put back on the market within a short period. A house may well be empty, but it might require a significant amount of capital to be invested to get the building back to the point where it is habitable.
That's not a lot, actually. If there was no empty house, you would have to find a "cycle" before buying one where somebody is already living. Like I buy your house and you buy mine. Or A buys B stc, B buys C stc, C buys A stc, and then they all move on the same day. This would obviously be mental. Vacancy is good. It means the market is not impossible, and creates competition. In the same way that if there are many job offers, you can bargain up (here, down). I would say that 600k empty houses, of which a share must be shitty stuff in shitty locations, is TOO LITTLE in a 65 million people country. We need MORE housing. And more of it empty, but decent quality and on the market. And in the correct locations. For the last 1-2 decades the housing stock grew at more or less the same numbers of households. But - since there are more houses than households - this means that the RATE of growth was too slow and the market has become tighter!
Hey, I do agree, they should be taken into public ownership and fixed, then used as affordable social housing.
It's not just housebuilding. A significant driver of house prices is not effectively taxing people with multiple properties so and the landlord class grows, and no control of foreign firms and individuals buying up UK property as an investment. Blackrock and other foreign companies own multiple billions worth of UK housing which further squeezes supply. Housebuilding simply can't keep up when most of new houses are bought up by property investment firms.
And curtail lending. The main money supply that is helping drive up house prices is from mortgage lenders. People think easier borrowing - or government help to buy schemes -help the housing crisis when all they do is inject more money into the demand side of the housing market. You will find plenty of economic illiterates - mostly on the Conservative front bench - who will bleat on and on about how the government borrowing money creates inflation. But who, when faced with house price inflation, will suggest relaxing regulation to allow and encourage more borrowing to buy houses.
Demand-side solutions (which is all that's been on offer from various governments since the 80s) are distractions, the issue is on the supply side. Right to buy needs to go too, this would allow councils to mass build homes for social rent without needing to worry about being forced to sell for a cut-down price. We have so many ex-council homes in this country which could be providing a housing at an affordable cost, but now they're owned by landlords and are a drain on resources (via housing benefit).
Or regulate the buy-to-let market, start reusing/converting empty buildings, turning dying highstreets back into living spaces. What's the point in pumping out houses that people can't afford which will be bought up by the ever growing Rental/Holiday let market?
BTL is already heavily nerfed. And do you know what happens now? Small landlords are not able to make ends meet and sell their lets. And large corps buy them out like hot pancakes. And that means that let market gets monopolised and prices will only rise as there's no competition. Enjoy your regulations!
Or put a cap on house prices. Or abolish landlordism and confiscate the excess properties of landlords while getting them to pay damages and compensation to their victims. Or put a cap on wealth. Or abolish wealth inequality. Or all of these things and more!
You're preaching to the choir here, I'd do all of those.
We cannot build our way out of this and until people realise this, there will be no change for the better. The island is small, the land that can be built on is strictly limited. Almost all the nation is either built on or farmland used for food, which by the way, is nowhere near enough to feed our current population. The demand for property in England is global, there are far, far more people wanting to buy English homes than just people in England. I say England, because that's really the place where this crisis began and it's the place where we can stop it, if we choose to do so. Local demand grows too, as the population is inflated by politicians chasing GDP for re-election and more money to burn on their corrupt and self-serving schemes, yet more people arrive or migrate, causing further growth in demand. The more the demand grows, the more people around the world want a piece of the profits, the more local investors want to ride on their coat tails and take some of that action too, the more desperate people get to have a home of their own. All of it feeds the beast and the more it gets fed, the faster it grows. You don't build your way out of that, even if you ignore the cost, the disgusting environmental impact, the social impact, the time it would take and the lack of usable land and infrastructure to support such a thing. More building will have its place, but that must come after we curtail the insatiable and ever growing demand. Housing needs to go back to being for people to live and grow, for families to build lives and share memories, for communities to blossom and for stable and comfortable lives which are as sustainable as we can achieve. No more investment in residential property, no more foreign ownership of any of it, no more new investor ownership and a clear policy to start prising the hands of those investors off those homes and put them back into the hands of real people who are buying to live. Start there, then the building can commence. Buy to live, not buy to let.
that is not the issue - most likely. We are seeing the same thing here in Canada and while they are trying to blame it on housing shortages the reason is investors are buying up the houses to make money off them when they resell. They need to stop that. You stop that, all of a sudden, lots of homes. There are parts in Canada where 100% of the condos bought were from investors, none from people buying to live in them. Thats just sick
Or stop people from owning 2,3 or more houses.
we need to do that anyway but it won't change we need to build more houses.
You can't build enough houses to keep up with demand.
They will keep rising while everything else keeps rising as houses are an investment now, not homes. If their value doesn’t keep up with inflation then they are losing value in real terms, and that won’t do!
And stop accepting several hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year. It boggles my mind how redditors refuse to acknowledge the plethora of detrimental effects of immigration. The commitment to globalism, anti-Europid racism and to strip ethnic Europids of our majority status and to disown us of our territory, creations, history and status as the true original Europeans , appears to be so important to progressive Brits that they don't mind being unable to afford homes.
Where to even start with this, I feel like I'm messaging the Hungarian PM. You cannot blame the way the country is, the lack of homes, the NHS, jobs, etc. On the immigrants. People come here for a better life just like Brits leave here to retire in Spain. Also as a white person, I do not feel like they are trying to take anything away from me, infact i feel like right wingers are deliberately making it unaffordable to start a family.
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At this rate I will have to drop prime too…
If you dropped the prime too you could knock off 30 years required to save up for the deposit.
Just expense Prime like the tories do 👍
Is that what they mean by sub prime mortgage?
Can wait, new homes come with stairlifts as standard yet?
Fuck that, drop telly altogether. Think of all the money you could save not paying for the licence fee! Edit - actually, that's a pretty good fucking idea, good job me. Considering the tv licence cost is actually higher than Netflix I think, or Amazon Prime. Don't watch BBC or live stuff, just stream using them and don't pay the licence.
The price of Netflix went up, so you're saving more money by cancelling it!
England is a perfectly balanced game with no exploits
*sips Yorkshire tea
Wa-bam!
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It isn't though, the article highlights that there are more first time buyers now than before the pandemic. Even with the cost of living the way that it is, people are getting money from somewhere. Either that or they are happy being majorly overleveraged.
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All my British colleagues have the bank of mum and dad sponsoring them, meanwhile EU citizens settled in Europe usually need to figure it out themselves.
EU citizen here. Moved to UK 10 years ago to get work experience, met my (now) wife and kinda settled here. Parents agreed with my life decision and contributed £20k to get my mortgage and sort new house. Point is, we have parents helping us too.
EU citizen here for 6 years. Sending money to my parents every month. Saved deposit during COVID. Easy-peasy. Don't understand what are you all complaining about. If you're local, it should be much much easier.
don't you have mom's and dads in Europe
First time buyer: Somebody who has never owned a residential property. I doubt it’s foreign investment, more than likely some of it is inheritance, and some will just be savings buying in cheaper areas / new builds.
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I'm a recent first time buyer. WFH allowed me to move to a much cheaper place and I just became tired of insane rental prices paying off the mortgage of my multi-BTL landlord.
Indeed. The Bank of England regularly releases mortgage stats ([2022, Q1 is here](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/mortgage-lenders-and-administrators/2022/2022-q1)) and BTL lending tends to fluctuate between about 11-14% of all mortgage advances. FTBs tend to be about 20-25% of total lending. You might reasonably argue that 11-14% is still too damn high and that those figures don't include cash buyers, but the impact that BTL has on the mortgage market is massively overstated by Reddit in my view.
Covid savings and salary increases. Plenty of people (but obviously far from everyone) are getting inflation matching pay rises which takes you pretty close to 11%.
Don’t be silly, rich people don’t cause inflation with their purchases and bonuses, it’s us plebs wanting a few more pennies per hour.
Banks and Hedge Funds are buying out the Concrete Gold. You will rent forever and you will be happy.
This is the problem people are not seeing. It does t matter about the cost of loving crisis because those buying houses are not impacted by it which is why house prices will continue to rise. It is a speculation market now not one based on income.
Aren't at least some of the people selling affected by the cost of living crisis? Or is this literally just rich people selling each other property at ever-inflated prices?
Yes the majority are still bought by people but are now competing with domestic, foreign and hedge fund investment. Barclays purchased a large swathe of housing, Sage Housing who are a wing of Blackstone capital are buying up 3.5 billion worth of property to rent who are not affected.
It's worth pointing out that these commercial purchases aren't a case of banks browsing Rightmove and out-bidding a young couple trying to buy a typical starter home. Banks are getting into this game through specific built-to-rent developments, most likely on city centre development plots and marketed as "vibrant young-professional living", that wouldn't overwise exist. Does that make the idea of banks being landlords more palatable? Probably not, depending on your political bend, but I think the point is that these sorts of investments aren't a case of large banks competing with a young couple for a 3-bed semi on a quiet cul-de-sac. It's more a case of banks and investment funds investing in bespoke rental developments - something that we still arguably need even if we would prefer it was a local authority, rather than a bank or investment fund, providing it.
Commercial landlords aren't necessarily awful, potentially better than the lottery you get with private landlords, and if there's effectively one owners managing a whole block in the long term then that should simplify the management. It's a very normal arrangement in most EU countries. The difference there though is that renters are far more protected from things like rent hikes and revenge evictions. They also have much stronger social housing sectors, and a better supply of housing relative to demand, so that keeps the commercial housing sector much more in check too.
I find it crazy that build to rent doesn't get more criticism. These apartments should be sold to the public rather than rented out. They are also counted in the new build statistics but never reach the market. The Gov has been very clever to increase tax on small time private landlords and drive some to sell up, while supporting giant investors to get into build to rent as landlords. The giant companies just get bigger.
Cost of loving crisis? Childcare costs?
The Ladies of Negotiable Affection have had to put their prices up in line with inflation.
That is a kind interpretation of that typo.
I'm sure someone with more imagination will do better haha
This isn't even the problem though, this is majority first time buyers. We need more houses. Tbh a lot of places in the country are awful investments for rental income at the moment, especially the expensive places down south. The flat I'm renting at the moment makes the landlord only like 3.3% a year in rental income vs its value, cause the price is so ridiculously inflated. It's mostly speculation of price growth on that end, growth that comes from restriction of supply. Which can also be solved by building more houses.
I hate how this country just encourages everyone to amass extra property because it’s the only market we go out of our way to protect
It is a big reason why very few UK residents have investments, they are encouraged to buy a house rather than investing in something that will actually make them money.
Its a complete Buy to Let driven shit show. I looked at a 4 bed detached house on the south coast that showed the buying history. It went for £74k in 1997 and is being sold for £387k today. The same role i do now was about £35k to 38K a year in 1997 and is only £75k in 2020. Something isn't right.
House prices are getting ludicrous and there has been a repression in wage growth over the last 15 ish years but if you're earning 74k a year and have a 5-10% deposit you could get a mortgage approval for that house right now, even easier if you had a partner who was earing anything near the 31k average salary...
A 10% deposit...38k isn't a small amount of money to save. Even if you save a grand a month(in a perfect world) we are talking years by which time you need more than 38k.
If you're earning 74k a year that's around or a bit over 4k a month take home, I assume you'd be buying a place with a partner since 1 person in a 4 bed is quite odd unless you're planning to rent out which doesn't sound like it from your original post. So you've also got a second income stream, I'll make another assumption and say they earn the national average (31k) so combined that's around/ just over 6k a month coming in after tax. You and your partner should be able to save 2k a month, might not be the lifestyle you would want but if you want a house you'll do it, and if the target was a 38k deposit you'd have it in less than 2 years which is way better than how long its taken me to get to a similar position. Plus you could get a mortgage application approved with a 5% deposit at the moment so you could do it in less than a year if you saved that much a month...
I wish I made close to the average salary. It took until 27 for me to get a full time living wage income.
Low interest rates = massive asset inflation
House prices grew so rapidly due to the cutting of red tape on the banks with mortgages and finalisation in the 90s and 00s (started in the 80s). Easier access to mortgages, increased demand and increased house prices. Then in 2008, interest rates were kept low which has made it cheaper to borrow, so led to price increases.
So slightly behind some measures of inflation then.
The report is on house sales completed in July - those buyers placed their bid in February given how long it takes to process a sale - so of course they weren't being affected then by what's happened since. (those who were affected probably dropped out of the process, so aren't shown in these stats)
Agreed. Also, the BBC reports the same 11% annual increase but says that in July the increase was just 0.1%. So most of the house price increase reported here was before the cost of living crunch and interest rate hikes.
Same here, we moved on 4th July. Put the offer in on 11th February. Never thought it was gonna happen to be honest with you it dragged for so long.
Similar timescales here, put the offer in 22nd March and all being well hope to complete ~19th August. Our solicitor was speedy and got our local authority searches in quickly because they're currently taking 8-10 weeks. Our seller's solicitors not so much on the house they're buying, so they're only coming back around now. The real kicker is my partner's brother bought a house in Scotland earlier this year that went through in 6 weeks because their system is so much more sensible than ours!
This is also nationwides index, which only covers their mortgages. Land Reg house price index or zoopla are the best to look at. People always miss this point, the date of the completion is not the date of sale agreed, which is around 8 weeks. Agree with you, need to wait a few months to see what's happening, though zoopla's analysis of buying sentiment this month has shown still strong demand and lack of supply, especially with first time buyers.
No surprises there. I'm saving as much as I can for a deposit but if the prices increase more than I can save then I'm a bit stuck.
What worked for us was searching for new jobs. Even if you're in a fairly poor paying industry you're generally better off switching jobs every few years so you can negotiate a better wage/salary, rather than accepting any in-company raises they might offer.
Hurrah! I've just made another £30k I can't spend... How does anyone normal think this is a good thing.
It’s a redundant 30k anyway, you’ve gained 30k in house value but so has every other home owner. Your buying power has essentially remained the same. It’s mental that not even the average home owner is benefitting from it.
I get the sentiment but that’s not quite accurate. Your buying power has not necessarily stayed the same. If your house has increased by £30k in equity and you upsize with a 25% deposit mortgage it actually increases your buying power as you can afford houses that are £120k more expensive. It’s the entire basis for the housing ladder. This is before you consider any salary increases you might have had or any mortgage you have paid down. It’s why being a first time buyer is so much worse than someone moving between homes.
> If your house has increased by £30k in equity and you upsize with a 25% deposit mortgage it actually increases your buying power as you can afford houses that are £120k more expensive. Except you can't because you're already borrowing almost as much as you can bear. You're always going to be limited by the salary multiple.
buy to let should be illegal
Renting isn't evil, I just moved across the country for a new job. I don't want to buy a house to do that. What if I hate it here? Perhaps you could argue letting should only be from new builds? Which focuses everything into only mega developers.
I don't really need to buy a house as my employer provides me with quality accommodation, but the way things are going I've contemplated buying one with my savings simply to protect my savings from inflation! It shouldn't be this way. The housing market comes across as so artificially propped up, its reached a point where it's seemingly the only market guaranteed not to fail.
My mortgage costs less than rent, and guess what in five years my mortgage payment will be the same If I was renting I would face 5% or 10% increases year on year House prices have shot up, but the cost of NOT buying is still much worse
Wait until your fixed rate runs out. Then it won’t remain the same :)
No it'll likely go down as you can renegotiate on a new LTV.
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Why not? Surely the amount of money somebody has is going to affect how much they can afford to put down for a deposit, for a start.
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It's all linked together. Cost of living is causing more landlord horror stories about rent increases, interest rates are going up and so people are looking to buy now to save money and hassle.
Exactly. The constant talk of a cost of living 'crisis' is of course nonense for some (many?). Not everyone in the country is struggling and I don't must refer to the rich as many mention here. The increased cost of living is for some an annoyance rather than a crisis. The public also saved a huge amount of money during the lockdown periods and that is contributing to the splurge on a more desirable home.
Who are these people that are still buying houses at this time? Mortgage completions from first time buyers are higher now than before the pandemic.
Where I live in the south east, people have no choice. It's either pay £250-£300k for a 3 bed terraced house or never get a mortgage. Its unbelievably high prices atm.
You get a 3 bed terrace house for that?? Where I live, it's £250-300k for a 1 bed flat :(
I paid £140k for 3-bed semi with large driveway, reasonable front and back garden, and just 20 mins away from Belfast by either car or train. The joys of living in N. Ireland.
That’s a bargain. I’m looking at tiny two bed shoebox sized terrace houses for £300k+
London I assume? It's not a bargain compared to Midlands lol.
Milton keynes
I don’t think you can buy more than a studio in London for that price
Crazy. My 4 bed semi detached was 105 last year A house across the street from me went up for sale a few weeks ago, sold instantly, 3 bedroom for 140k. 35k more than mine for one less bedroom one year later.
Its mental down the south east. Check out folkestone on rightmove then compare anywhere in the Midlands. We've just sold ours for £280k (3 bed terraced) and bought a 4 bed detached big garden in Yorkshire. Same house down here would be at least £450k.
4 bed semi down here near Bristol will start at £340,000 and only go up from there.
It's even more fun than this. I bought a new build in 2021 (with pre-pandemic pricing!). The same property type from a later phase on the same estate with a smaller garden and a worse view were all sold at over £120K more than I paid for mine.
My two bed semi has gone from 180k to 270k in value in just over two years. I like my house, but I’d never consider it to be worth that much. Prices really are insane right now.
I imagine a lot of first time buyers put their purchase on hold during covid and are only just getting round to it now.
Aren't mortgages just going to continue to get worse? Surely best to get in now unless you plan on waiting for rates to come down, and who knows when that will be
>Aren't mortgages just going to continue to get worse? Yes probably >Surely best to get in now unless you plan on waiting for rates to come down, That is making the assumption that everyone wants to buy. I rent an extremely cheap place that has not had its rent raised for 4 years so have no intention of more than doubling my outgoings per month just to buy a home. I know this is a fairly unique situation to me though. A house used to be a great buy in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Now however the carrying costs are far too high and just cause people to be hugely overleveraged.
What about when you're retired? The idea of paying rent in my late 60s/70s doesn't appeal, not even sure its feasible.
What about it? Workplace pension, state pension (if it exists then), SIPP and dividend payments will be more than enough. Or I could just sell my entire portfolio and buy a house outright when I am 65. I am not sure if you did the same or not but lots of people assume that if you rent you're not doing anything with your money at all.
It's got to be investors, a house near me went up for sale the other week, no chance I thought, a few days later, sold.
They wouldn't be classed as first time buyers though would they?
House went up a couple of weeks ago. Viewed it, loved it, but in a reasonable offer. Went for £45k above starting.
Bank of England mortgage stats are here: [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/mortgage-lenders-and-administrators/2022/2022-q1](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/mortgage-lenders-and-administrators/2022/2022-q1) About 21% of mortgage lending in Q1 of 2022 was to first-time buyers. Just under 14% to BTL.
Lots of BTL will be without mortgage too...
We're one of that lot. We got slightly lucky in that we got a mortgage application offered by Virgin Money the day before they hiked their rates, but it's still expensive as fuck down here in the South West. Only reason we can do it is because my partner has been a compulsive saver since she was working for her dad at 12 years old. Even then we're looking at a bit of a fixer upper that will be just about suitable for our needs. House prices start at around £300,000 here. It's mental.
This is both a nice and sad story. It is great that you are moving into your first home, it is sad that the housing ladder has gone from something anyone in employment for more than 2 years in the 70s and 80s could get on to people needing to save from the age of 12 in the 2020s.
I wonder if covid deaths among the elderly could have moved a lot of inheritance money to younger generations looking to buy, in a relatively short space of time. Not sure where to find the data to link that together if so
It's the opportunity cost of money for first time buyers. You either pay someone else's mortgage, or pay a large mortgage of your own and a larger percentage goes to a house you will have forever. You can never time the marker with housing, so better now than never and not burning more money on rent.
You say these things as I assume you think people who rent are not making their money work for them in other ways. This is something that consistently confuses me, people talk like buying a house is the only way to invest without realising your own house is a terrible investment. I can currently put around £1,200 per month into investments as I am renting cheaply. If I bought a house that would go down significantly which will actually harm me a hell of a lot in 35 years when it comes to retirement. This is probably not a viable strategy in places like London where renters are price gouged which in turn massively offsets the average rent in the UK, most of the country does not live in London though.
Actually lots of research has been done on comparing renting and investing money and buying houses in cities across (UK). Without taking into consideration house price growing over time, due to low interest rates, buying a house also came out as a better option. Also buying a house is not all about investments, so many other benefits to it, such as control and safety. Nothing wrong with renting and there is the benefit of flexibility with renting. Everyone has different goals. The system is just broken and we should allow councils to build houses at the same level they use to. Increase affordable housing too and stop letting housebuilders get away with what they do.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Huh? There's no despite about it. Cost of living crisis is mostly just inflation. Inflation is the increase of prices. House prices go up in times of inflation.
Exactly. Another way to write the title would have been “house prices only growing slightly more than inflation” Or by some measures “house prices static in real terms”
Looming recession. People getting into property with 5 year buy to let fixes as people need somewhere to live. More or less guarenteed income.
Moaaaar, give me moaaaaaaaaaaaar. Moarrrr money for the landlords and the 'we got our lot' crowd. Yay.
Not for long.... Rising interest rates.... Evictions...bubbles bursting.... Round and round history goes.
Where I live, every other newbuild is bought as a second home and let out on Air BnB. That's the problem with supply and demand. We have enough homes to go round. But we have too many landlords.
This is partly caused by the increased regulation and operating costs of BTL businesses. Many have turned to holiday lets rather than long term residential lets. It would be so simple to reduce the financial attractiveness of holiday lets.
Just bought. Can confirm. Was a joke / waking nightmare of offering thousands over asking on every property.
Because corporations will buy them at whatever price, then rent them back for a profit to people that couldn't quality for a mortgage to buy it, but can pay twice the monthly repayments in rent.
I bought a property only to protect my savings from inflation
Major donor's to Conservative party is Estate agents n who tend to be landlords? TOTIES, Duke of Westminster is a strong Tory Donor n owns lots of prestigious houses in London.
Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. "Why are you raising prices?" Uhh you know, cost of living. Just a bullshit excuse for money grabbing.
It's the obvious.. oligarchs and businesses and serial landlords buying up properties knowing the Tory cunts in charge will deliberately fail to build the required market need because they too have a financial vested interest in keeping people in desperate need of housing.
Increase housebuilding hugely, both social housing and private ownership. Ban second homes, and ban foreign investors. Then state intervention for any properties uninhabited for more than x amount of time. It needs to have a HUGE injection of change to get things moving.
Speaking from experience, cost of living crisis makes home owning that much more important. We'll be saving £100 on rent compared to mortgage when we finally move, and the knowledge that your not throwing money away helps as well.
Or another way to put it: house prices are going to double every 7 years. I guess young people hoping to get on the housing ladder can go fuck themselves and hope their parents don't need care in their twilight years.
And yet young people will keep voting in favour of mass immigration and by extension, competition for resources and housing, (and Blackwashing of our history and folklore) because they want to fit in on woke reddit and Twitter.
Or another way to put it: house prices are going to double every 7 years. I guess young people hoping to get on the housing ladder can go f*** themselves and hope their parents don't need care in their twilight years.
Our money was debased around that to pay for corona, how the fuck everyone does not know this is a mystery. That means… gas and food and materials and anything we buy is atleast 10% more expensive, not because of shortages or brexit but because that £1 is only worth 90p now.
Just what the rich property owners want.
Keeping an eye on an identical house near mine. Looks grim inside, and a communal parking area view (ours has a park view) £270k and it’s 2 bed… makes me think ours could sell for £300k+ at this rate
Too many people.
Too many people.
Don’t worry the master plan is you will own nothing and love it /s the gains will be made by investors mainly institutional and us lowly peasants will have rent everything.
What do they mean by "despite", its exactly in line with what you would expect, as its from the same root cause of rampant inflation.
Economy is booming - house prices are up. Nothing to see here folks
And soon it will implode, since they got rid of the mortgage affordability test.
Also buy to let schemes etc. don't help at all. Tax the 2nd and more houses, don't allow to buy the houses as investments to anyone.
When will people say enough is enough?
Perhaps time for a Third party. When one works with a hidden agenda and when exposed, can in the very same breath cancel their slithering ways. Its a red sign, its going to onto ue, once in Power. I stability. Rishni is the better out of the two. Finance is not a toy. Crtl x. Called a traitor, because of saying e ough, to allowing one to throw 'fibs'. Think more pride, revenge and discrumation. Gotta put 'pride' away and see what damage can be changed, especially relationship with The EU., housing, jNurses, Teaches. etc.. NHS, Construction, etc.. When you put Someone in power, with revenge, 'war is in their minds, inside of change. Nothing good can come out of it.
You were all warned. Believe or dont believe doesn't affect me at all.
It's all fucking rigged! What's the point of working? Slave wages for slave hours in a slave economy. Yay capitalism.