TwickenhamCyclist
Guest
There are still some cheap spots outside St Pauls's I believe! No rent, no bills!
How can people afford to rent anymore?
- Thread starter XmisterIS
- Start date
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jamin100
Guru
- Location
- Birmingham
wow... I thought I had it bad. I pay £540 mortgage for a nice 3 bed semi In a decent area in Birmingham and about 15 minutes drive from the city centre and im only 28 and have 3 kids. God knows what id do if i had to pay nearly double that for rent!
OP
OP
XmisterIS
Purveyor of fine nonsense
Quite (although I am not 28 with 3 kids!
I bought back when house prices and rental prices were halfway sensible. My house cost me £100K in 2002. At the top of the market back in 2006/2007, it was valued at £250K. That is just bonkers - an increase of 150% in five years. Nuts. In fact, I look forward to house prices slumping because it means that while the percentage difference between the price of my place and my next house "up" will be a much smaller amount in real terms than it is now.
jamin100
Guru
- Location
- Birmingham
we brought ours in 2008 just as the housing prices we getting really low. It cost us £141k but has since been valued at £180k. However I cant really see us ever moving as we really like the house, the plot and the area so it may well be the last house we ever buy
snailracer
Über Member
The average working person who buys a house is essentially voluntarily enslaving themselves to the lenders - ruthless banks. The majority of the money paid for a house is simply capital we "float" to bankers so they can speculate at our expense.
For an average person, a house is not a sound investment because it breaks almost every rule of sound investment: it is not diversified in type or time, it is large (to the extent that people neglect their pensions), transferring it incurs lots of charges, wastes lots of time and restricts your ability to move to find better employment, etc. Nonetheless, a bank will lend you £100k's to buy a house, yet will not lend you anywhere near the same for other, safer and better types of investment.
In most other developed countries, the majority of people rent. However, the housing market in the UK has been distorted for so long, there is nothing left worth renting.
Due to the connivance of successive governments and the banks, an entire generation has been brainwashed into treating housing as investments instead of what they should be - housing. People should recognize this for the corruption it is.
Thatcher had a great idea, flog the council housing stock to the tenants.
Unfortuanatly she forgot to add that for every house sold a new one should be built (or bought) by the council for the next generation of council tenants (who would eventually buy the house, and so one more could be built or bought)
End result is we are now so many properties short that if (according to the Daily Mail) we need to build 200 houses a day for the next 23 years just to catch up.
Daily Mail aside we have a major shortage of housing, hence the massive rate hikes both for rent and purchase and unless there is mass emigration (which would happen if we had a major ression in the UK), or a Marshall Plan style of building program (which could happen to buy our way out of the above recession) then the housing problem will persist for at least the next half century.
Unfortuanatly she forgot to add that for every house sold a new one should be built (or bought) by the council for the next generation of council tenants (who would eventually buy the house, and so one more could be built or bought)
End result is we are now so many properties short that if (according to the Daily Mail) we need to build 200 houses a day for the next 23 years just to catch up.
Daily Mail aside we have a major shortage of housing, hence the massive rate hikes both for rent and purchase and unless there is mass emigration (which would happen if we had a major ression in the UK), or a Marshall Plan style of building program (which could happen to buy our way out of the above recession) then the housing problem will persist for at least the next half century.
Councils and housing associations in England and Wales had nearly 100,000 of their own properties sitting empty at the end of last year. Doing something about those would help.
SavageHoutkop
Veteran
- Location
- South Manchester-ish
Hang on a sec. From http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/housingplanningstatistics2010 there were 3.8 million social renters (possibly England only or perhaps UK as a whole, not read the whole document). 100,000 is 2.6%; which surely could be accounted for by properties being temporarily vacant due to one tenant having moved and another not yet moved in - or indeed due to upgrades or similar?
'Upgrades' is nearer to the mark. Some stock is left boarded up for years on end. Months is very common.
U
User482
Guest
How long were they empty for? Any council or housing assoc. will have a number of properties empty at any given time, due to tenancy changes, refurbishment works, redevelopment, etc.
bigjim
Legendary Member
- Location
- Manchester. UK
If my memory serves me correct I had to stump up 25% of the cost of my first house as a deposit. Also interest rates were up to 15%. We had no carpets, one kitchen unit, ate off an ironing board and had s/hand furniture donated to us. We were both working in decent jobs at average wages and still had no spare money. That was in the early 70s. We were quite happy though as other couples were in the same boat and we used to go round to others houses with a bottle as we could not afford to go out. We moved from a rented flat as the mortgage was cheaper, so rental must have pretty expensive then. I can't remember thinking it was hard. We just accepted thats how it is. I think the pressure on young couples from society now is tremendous as you have to be seen to be successful with the good house, car, clothes, i phone etc.
snailracer
Über Member
Many of those are unlettable and Up North - no-one wants to live where there aren't any jobs.
Also, the bulk of property is privately owned or operated by private landlords. Of those, the true occupancy rate is probably 50% - lots of childless couples, retired people, etc. living in 3 or 4 bedroom houses with many rooms under-utilised. It's like every employee parking a SUV and caravan in the company car park and complaining when the car park is full. I am guilty of this myself, I am married but childless, nonetheless my last three addresses were 3, 4 & 3 bedroom houses - we only used one bedroom in each, the other rooms were for junk storage
.Houses are inefficient use of space, so what we actually need are purpose-built flats, but we in the UK are psychologically unable to make use of them ("no investment opportunity", "scummy renters", etc) so none get built. Look to other countries, where the average working person rents a decent apartment (purpose built, not some crappy loft conversion/extension to someone's creaky house) at reasonable price, and isn't considered a loser or yuppie.
I recall investigating this (unprofessionally) a while back and finding statistics showing a vast amount of empty properties in the UK, many of which were in quite affluent areas - something like 10% of the entire UK's vacant housing being in London. I'm sure the overall figure was actually several orders of magnitude higher than 100,000.
I shall try looking up the info I found this evening.
One thing I learned is that there are a lot of landlords (including councils) keeping properties empty for long periods of time so that they can make them available to sell at exactly the right moment. With the property market so uncertain at the moment this is apparently happening a great deal. If they housed tenants, they would be unable to sell them exactly when they wanted.
I've heard speculation that the reason the current government want to bring in new laws against squatting now is to make it easier for landlords to do this - suggestions implying the new laws are more about making it easier for landlords to kick tenants out than to stop squatters moving in.
No, the figure is for council/HA houses empty for six months or more. Some will of course have been empty for much longer - in Leeds we have several council developments from the 70/80s which have been all but derelict for three or four years.
On the same measure there were six times as many empty private sector houses. Mind you, that's all private sector housing, not just private landlords. Social renting stock is about 20% greater than private renting stock, so before councils stick up websites for concerned citizens to report empty private houses for the council to take over - as they do - maybe they should do something about their own long term vacant stock?
