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Find out where you can afford to buy or rent in Great Britain
- canbus 3y agotl;dr: if you live in the middle of fucking nowhere you're probs ok, otherwise landlord monopoly!
- substation13 3y agoA job or a house: choose one
- globular-toast 3y agoThat's a false dichotomy. A soul-destroying commute is also available!
- dagw 3y agoIf you want to buy as close as possible to London, need at least 2-bedrooms and have a median household income without too much saving, then you're literally commuting in from Wales.
- sofixa 3y agoAnd with the money saved you can buy a small plane for the commute!
- philjohn 3y agoOr Rugby, which I do. Yes, the season ticket works out to £800 a month, but I'd be paying multiples of that each month for my house in London. Commute is 1h15m door to door, and the majority of that is on the high speed train from Rugby to Euston where I can either get work done, or read/listen to a podcast.
- insightful1 3y ago[flagged]
- reedf1 3y agoThe majority of people cannot afford their own home at today's prices. That is the simplest metric I've found for the intergenerational robbery taking place. The government will try their best to keep housing pegged but it will blow the gaskets off commodities and the cost of living.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> The government will try their best to keep housing pegged Pegged to what?
- badcppdev 3y agoAssuming OP means, "The government will try their best to keep house price increasing" although I'm aware that the use of the word pegged is confusing. A common opinion is that governments feel that increasing house prices will keep the voters coming in as people work their butts off to get onto the housing ladder (escalator) and then want the bubble to keep expanding as it's their main form of savings. Western society is all in on the Ponzi scheme here.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI've heard it's less about voters directly, and more about the retirement savings being tied up in real estate so deeply that breaking the housing market would not only cost you votes, but probably turn the country into a humanitarian crisis.
- mrlonglong 3y agoPegging also means being buttfucked with a strap-on.
- prepend 3y agoI remember thinking the same thing 30 years ago talking with my friends’ parents. And they said the same about the previous generation.
- 3y ago
- colesantiago 3y agoIt doesn't look like any young person can own their own home in the UK anytime soon, is this the picture of setting them up to fail? So when are we expecting a housing crash in the UK? 3, 5 years? This really cannot go on.
- insightful1 3y agoThere's a million immigrants per year and a tenth of that in new builds Now do the math
- reedf1 3y agoYes and the prescription is even more new builds. We need immigration, we are aging.
- insightful1 3y agoOk, bring 50 million then, and build accordingly We are aging and your argument is irrefutable
- mnd999 3y agoRight wing commentators, which is basically the whole media, like to blame immigration for all the problems in the country. It’s much simpler and less awkward for them than trying to explain what is really going on.
- insightful1 3y agoImmigration is demand, while supply has been sticky, prices have gone up massively. It's economics 101. But you think there's a kind of boomer conspiracy instead (ageist and racist undertones).
- sokoloff 3y agoTo be fair, a lot of the griping about immigration also reads to me to have racist undertones. (That could be influenced by my American reading, but it doesn't seem 100% that.)
- petercooper 3y agoI thought some of the results were sus. Renting a 5 bedroom house in Beaconsfield or Sevenoaks (~30 miles outside London) surely couldn't average £4000-6000 a month? Took a look on Rightmove and eek.. Glad I moved up north 20 years ago!
- reisse 3y agoOne of the news outlets in my country did the article with the similar title, something like "When you can afford buying your own house if you save money from average salary". The article was from one word: "Never." Was expecting to see something similar here.
- eyko 3y agoTo be fair, average salary varies per city* and if you earn the average salary in any city*, chances are you'll be able to rent but not buy. I've tried a few London post codes and their average salaries: deep red can't buy can't rent. I've also picked a few random places up north and around Manchester, and it came out orange. I wouldn't be surprised if the conclusion was the same for most of the country! edit: fixed postcode->city typo.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoLink please?
- rcarr 3y agoThis is why I’m leaving the country. If I’m going to have to rent for the rest of my life I’ll give my money to a foreign landlord out of spite. The leaders and elders of this country have betrayed the youth and torn up the social contract. I’ll go rent in Ireland for 5 years and get my EU passport back. Fuck em.
- secondcoming 3y agoHousing affordability and supply is a massive issue in Ireland too. I'm not sure there's NOT an EU major city that isn't having this problem. Lisbon citizens are being priced out of their own city by people with the same plan as you. So you can solve your problem by leaving the UK but then you just create a problem for someone else. I don't think there's a solution to this problem until people start living on boats.
- diarmuidc 3y agoYeah there is a solution. Build more housing. It's a political issue and nothing more
- secondcoming 3y agoYa turn the country into one massive council estate. Brilliant. I'd rather live on a boat
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoWe're far away from any country becoming a housing estate.
- piva00 3y agoOf course it's a political issue. Policies on housing ownership have pushed housing as an investment to normal people for decades, as something that will, almost certainly, go up in value. Many, many people have bought a house they might not even be very happy with just for the sake of parking their money in a "safe investment" that they can live inside in the meantime, until they can sell and purchase the next one, rinse and repeat. If you want to crash prices by building more housing then you'll have a lot of angry common people who are paying a lot for their mortgages which will go under water, of course these people will push as much as possible, politically speaking, for that to not happen. Personally I'd be extremely happy if more housing is built and housing prices are pushed down but we can't deny that the reality of policies that took us here, those policies were wrong, housing should have never been part of a speculative market and been traded as another kind of commodity. It's not a commodity, it's not a pure asset, it's shelter for humans, economical policies thought by and implemented by ideologues pushed down our throats that housing is just like any other tradable asset... And now we have a lot of people that would never want to see prices go down because they will lose their life savings. So yes, how can this not be political? Saying that it's a "political issue and nothing more" is like denying the reality that it is political, there's no other way. You can't remove the political aspect of this issue, there's no "just build more housing" without the parties/politicians that implement it being absolutely hated by a segment of society. Would you still vote for a party that enacts policies that make your life investments lose 50% of value? In a democracy most things are political, that's the hard part of the solution for most social issues...
- nonethewiser 3y agoFor all the Americans using this tool, be sure to kneecap your household income. Particularly software engineers, as a typical entry level salary can be around 45k. In London.
- tlocke 3y agoThe problem in the UK is under-occupation of houses, rather than a shortage of houses. In other words, there are more than enough houses for the population to fit into, the problem is that a lot of home owners have a lot of unused bedrooms. The culprits here are the owner-occupiers rather than the landlords. IIRC, 50% of owner-occupied houses have two or more spare bedrooms, but only 25% of rental houses have two or more spare bedrooms. The solution is to have a spare bedroom tax rather than a property tax.
- isoprophlex 3y agoYes, an empty bedroom license, why not. I'm eagerly awaiting the spicy "oi m8! U got a loicence for dat bedroom?" memes.
- throwaway22032 3y agoOr we could just build more homes, rather than cramming everyone into a smaller space. You know, like when we built a ton of social housing in the 60s. Enforcing the flatshare life on everyone is about the worst idea I can think of. edit: build up, build out, build down, do whatever. I'd prefer normal homes with gardens and I think most people would - I see no reason to limit ourselves - but right now we could do with anything. Shuffling the deckchairs solves nothing. There is nothing in principle preventing us from building rows of town houses again and giving families somewhere to grow and live. We don't need to handicap ourselves with Dickensian/third world notions of one room per person.
- tlocke 3y ago> Or we could just build more > homes, rather than cramming > everyone into a smaller space. With a spare bedroom tax, the average space per-person doesn't change, but the median rises and the cost drops dramatically. > This message written from my > study, which you'd tax me to > be in because of course any > luxury must be eliminated. A spare bedroom tax only applies to houses with two or more spare bedrooms. It also replaces propert tax, and so in your case you'd be better off financially.
- 3y ago
- edandersen 3y agoThis is also why in-country remote work is so dangerous to property owners. The one thing that could allow equitable access to housing cannot be allowed to happen.
- throwaway22032 3y agoI own a house in one of the red zones on the map, bought a few years ago. It's pretty bizarre to see this stuff continually. If I thought it was actually hopeless I would have left the country long ago. Cannot fathom the idea of thinking "I will never own a house". I don't get why people stay.
- melx 3y agoI respect The Guardian but sometimes they beat too much of the leftist/socialist agenda (everything should be free for everyone).
- bell-cot 3y agoGut reaction to the headline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Kilda,_Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Kilda,_Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Georgia_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Georgia_Island
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lozenge 3y agoGB is geographical while UK is political. I knew a pedant would visit you so I figured it might as well be me.
- bell-cot 3y agoQuite true. And legal permission to live on St. Kilda or Rockall might be a tad difficult to obtain. South Georgia, OTOH... The UK has political reasons to want a permanent civilian population, and the handful of British Antarctic Survey members on South Georgia might wish to see some fresh faces.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- louissan 3y agoElephant in the room -- with all the "cost of living" crisis striking across the lower, middle and even sometimes higher ranks of incomes, the MSM are starting to wake up to one stone-hard reality: house prices are f*ing bonkers. Irony -- after praising the "feel rich" wave that has been plaguing Western countries since the dotdom bubble burst. We know the income multipliers from the article, and the article hints at the pain of those households who are going to get caught when remortgaging (the act of having to re-negotiate your borrowing conditions after a period of time has expired, basically). 2020 from the daily mail, BBC, guardian (aka grauniad), telegraph (aka torygraph) and others: . "House prices are rising and god that's wonderful" . "Buy now before it's too late! Don't miss out!" . "How to borrow sensibly over 35 years" (lol) . "Rates are low, now is a good time to get on the housing ladder!" . in a word, property porn, sprinkled with a generous amount of "Fear Of Missing Out". Despicable. Successive governments, big fans of the "free market": . Help to buy . Various loan garantees . Lobbying and land hoarding from a cartel of (very large, very connected) building companies/groups. This is a fucking mess. Prices as high as this haven't been seen in the UK since Victorian times. And we all know Victorian times were great from all perspectives, don't we?) and the only entities benefiting from them are: . Governments (stamp duty, etc) . Banks (longer mortgages) . Some law firms/professions . Estate agents. Despicable. The rest suffer from: . being tied to inordinate amounts of debt for what is most people's __entire__ professional life . tied -> less mobility . tied -> more fear, more docility . etc, etc. Not to mention that with interest rates rises, those monthly payment aren't exactly coming down (Anytime soon? pivot one day?). On top of food prices. On top of energy prices. On top of tax banding. etc, etc. And now the MSM has the galling audacity to vomit such articles. Makes you wonder: . They are probably crying for help to the government (in "gimme gibs" mode) . Writers may or may not be up to the hilt in a very very long mortgagy relationships with a bank . Whether they should be confronted with the appalling content they exposed to a (unfortunately and too-often-ly) financially illiterate readership. And make them pay. Somehow. Everyone's blood should start boiling when reading such hypocrisy coming from a publication like the Guardian (see list above).
- lozenge 3y agoThey play both sides. You can find hand wringing articles when house prices go up by only 0.8% instead of what homeowners would like. The same day as they decry housing as unaffordable.
- eertami 3y agoThe biggest problem is that buying is simply the only option, because renter protections are poor and the government constantly shovels taxpayer money into the pockets of homeowners. And so house prices are artificially inflated with help to buy schemes that inject taxpayer money, instead of being their real value. The reality is that in the UK, a house is no longer a house, it is a government backed asset that will never be allowed to fall, lest the pension funds fail.
- _k__ 3y agoI work in tech (like everyone else on this site). So, to buy my house I did the standard tech thing of selling the company I built. Why doesn't everyone just do that? Jokes aside, the housing situation in the UK is a joke right now. Places like Skye are forcing out locals because rich people are buying holiday homes there that are empty 99% of the time. This also means there is lots of job vacancies because its impossible to afford to live there and do minimum wage work. Article about Skye from last year https://news.stv.tv/highlands-islands/families-forced-to-leave-skye-due-to-lack-of-housing https://news.stv.tv/highlands-islands/families-forced-to-lea...
- sys_64738 3y agoThe trouble with that country is that everything is central to London which is almost a city-state unto itself. Until you break the cycle of centralizing industry in that location then you can't crash property prices. What you need is for central government to be moved out of London to reduce the dependency on this single region. As it is, London is susceptible to severe flooding as global warming continues to increase temperatures. That alone should move industry elsewhere.
- AeroNotix 3y agoI left in '09 and I 'aint coming back. See ya later, shitlords.
- Krisjohn 3y agoI believe the difference between SA15 (£154,995) and SA16 (£220,000) is a single wealthy individual who's been buying up everything in SA16 to rent.