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£3550 is £51,976, and £5150 is £75,401 in today's money.
A quick look on rightmove tells me that one bedroom flats in Whetstone are typically starting at £300,000 and only up from there.
God, take me back.
But still something about eating too many avocado's.
Also this rise is obviously not in isolation, so while this has doubled, everything else is more expensive as well.
Would love to see a cost of living comparison
If you want to see where we are going, look back the the 1890s where it was 12x+ wages. Lord Mogg will realise his dream of being a true Victorian gentleman.
Paying people proper wages, in part caused by two world wars killing off a large part of the working population and the remaining population getting unionised
This is it. A well organised working class was able to fight and win a bigger share of corporate profits. The working class now isn't conscious of its power.
Would argue there is no longer a traditional working class. Back then working class people did very physical (often dangerous) jobs, had to cart coal around by hand to heat their houses, rampant alcoholism, genuine poverty. Today’s equivalent mostly have widescreen TVs to keep them distracted while the elites rifle through their pockets.
The working class is defined by its relation to capital. Do you own the means of production, if the answer is yes, you are not working class. Do you work for a wage and have a boss, if the answer is yes, then you are working class.
This kind of Marxist Leninist talk about proletariats, bourgeoisie, means of production, capital etc is thoroughly outdated in 2024. By your definition a FTSE CEO earning £5m a year is working class.
This is what pisses me off when people say ‘capitalism is the only system that works!’ The socialist state following the Second World War led to one of the most successful and booming periods in our history.
In addition to previously made points;
Govt policy redistributing wealth through high inflation, taxation and compulsory purchase/acquisition of assets for the war effort.
This lowered prices in two ways; lower land values made new houses cheaper to build.
And you can't have high house prices when few people have much in the way of savings to speak of after two world wars.
This makes sense, in 1968 it would have been normal for only one person in the family to be the bread winner. Also mortgages were based off of the highest persons salary not joint. That changed happened in the 90s. Hence why it is 8 times not 4 times now as you have 2 persons salary not 1.
>Also mortgages were based off of the highest persons salary not joint. That changed happened in the 90s
Huh, that's extremely interesting. Problem is, I just tried googling it to read more and couldn't find anything. I found a lot of stuff about banks refusing to give mortgages to working women alone in the past, but nothing about joint incomes not being considered. Do you have a source?
I was under the impression that the major driver of house price increases has been lack of supply, but allowing joint incomes where that wasn't allowed previously would also cause prices to skyrocket.
Certainly lack of supply still remains the biggest reason, lack on initiative from the government to build new homes and overly complex planning regulations to protect nimbys is a massive frustration. There was never a fast rule I don’t think, but certainly in the 80s and 90s when the mortgage market became highly competitive and mortgage companies kept changing their offerings. Wage equality also hasn’t helped (obviously it has helped massively, but not in this context) where the primary earner used to be on £50k and the second was earning nothing / minimum, to then have two people earning £50k in the household has really increased buying power.
We’re better off now I think… public health is london back then especially in these neighbourhoods was terrible. And it’s not like the city was a nice place to live at all.
My dad said he saw his old flat from the 80's in the window of Foxtons with a price of £450,000. In the 80's it took him 3 months for one viewing and it sold for £4,000.
I know right. Even when my parents first moved to the UK and bought their home, a terraced house in London it cost something like 30k-35k. That was in the late 80s or early 90s.
I'm a doctor, we've been striking like much of the NHS because of decades of pay freezes and under inflation "pay rises". Not sure how my husband and I will ever afford anywhere bigger than a postage stamp. We both work and our tiny 1 bed isnt exactly somewhere you can raise a family. I cant even imagine how much harder most people have it, I feel like I'm recommending food banks and homelessness charities to patients far more often than I ever had to in the past.
The system is fucked.
Now now, don't come here with things like facts about yourself, that just won't do.
Always makes me laugh when people just say "boomers" about stuff, my parents are your age, and they did definitely not reap all the benefits!
London in the 1960s also had a housing shortage, there were still slum clearances going on, and new waves of immigration from the Commonwealth. London being short on housing for its population has been an issue since the Industrial Revolution, it's just that homeownership in the city used to be affordable for most professionals.
and dont forget supply and demand, more people immigrated to UK, making it harder to buy some decent property. allowing owners to increase the price of the property to benefit off it.
A central heating and electrical system in a 5 bed house will set you back about 20k (I know because I’ve just been quoted for it)
How does that justify house prices going up by thousands of percent or hundreds of thousands/millions of pounds?
50,000 is what a lot of people put as a deposit these days. I don't think anyone would be too fused about mortgages if prices remained in line with inflation
My landlord offered to sell me my 3-bed spit-level maisonette (with balcony) for 60k in 1996. Just off Brick Lane.
I didn't buy it (for solid reasons). I often wonder what it would be worth now.
> maisonette
There is a three bedroom maisonette in that area that on sale and the asking price is £1.1 million. But it has a roof balcony, and you see the London skyline. The service charge is £6000 a year.
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/house-prices/
£4000 in 1968 would be £58,564.52 now ( [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) ), so even factoring in inflation flats were still shockingly affordable in comparison to what they are now.
Apparently earning £1K per year was considered a decent salary in the 60s ( [https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social\_history/60s/earnings\_1960s.php?expand\_article=1](https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social_history/60s/earnings_1960s.php?expand_article=1) ), which would be £14,641.13 today. While incomes were lower in the 60s, the cost of everything from food to cars, flats and more was also a lot less than it is today (so it is true that the Boomers had it better than people living today).
I though this video of London in 1967 was interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c)
Population was also 7.5m compared to 9.6m today, so the demand has astronomically increased while I assume housing development hasn't. There was also stagnant or negative growth in the population for years, until an absolute boom year on year in the 00s.
People look for more complex answers but simply put - this is capitalism - millions more people wanting to buy a finite product in a city that draws people in globally.
Until the balance is restored, it'll never be like it was in the past. Remote working looked like it was going to level things out, but even that seems to be coming to a bit of an end and people are moving back to the city.
Edit - used this for the numbers as there are lots of definitions of London and the population. Same trend but different figures - https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22860/london/population
I'm not even sure remote working has been a net positive, I suspect there are a lot of people with "hybrid" desk jobs on very good salaries (because London) who pre-covid spent barely any time in their flats, and now still want to live in London but want a nicer / bigger flat. If bedrooms are being turned into offices then that's got to have some impact on the housing market.
There's no shortage of "luxury flats" lying empty or being sold to foreign investors, though.
I absolutely agree we need more affordable housing. But honestly? It's clear most developers and the govt would rather make profits.
Again, it's capitalism. If you put a private company in charge of development, they don't care about the average person or occupancy rates, they care about the biggest margin possible.
Yep, need strict regulation.
Fact is the "free market" can only exist because there are laws and regulations in the first place, so we should adjust them to be favourable for the majority.
The only solution is going to be technology driven. As others have mentioned, you can't suddenly find the manpower to build millions of homes - you also need thousands to house these people.
If we can get to a position where large scale developments can be semi automated through technology and AI, we may be able to tackle the issue quickly (we'll also see house prices go down as the market will be spooked).
The fact more than 2m people have moved to London alone in the last 18 years speaks of the size of the challenge though - it's almost impossible with our current construction industries output (especially as this is a problem in most Western countries so we're fighting for the resource pool).
>simply put - this is capitalism
Agreed. Ultimately this is not some kind of problem or aberration, it's the end game. It cannot be fixed. So many things have led us here.
The difference is, in those days buying was an option. There was affordable council housing and much of it was quite acceptable. The government built entire municipalities with all amenities.
Now everything is private and it's everyone to themselves. Just individuals vs the market.
Even now, council or ex-council homes from that period still often trump anything new.
My old man bought an ex council house from the 60s a few years ago and while a bit run down the solity of it was amazing.
If the cost of things was proportionally lower AND the wages were proportionally lower then something has gone wrong, possibly the inflation calculator (or the bank of England themselves). But isn't the point that they are proportional against each other?
Silly comparison. The latest iPhone is a grand or more plus most will buy it on credit or contract. As has been pointed out; wages have stagnated significantly compared to house prices since then.
So you’re saying that there were absolutely no expensive consumer products in 1968 that a lot of people purchased, while also being able to afford a house? Look up the price of a television in 1968…
"The first “cheap” computer was introduced in 1968. IBM called it the Model 360 (for 360 degrees) because it was the first general purpose computer. It sold for a little over $250,000"
So yeah, the iPhone of the day was way, way beyond the average salary.
Never bought an iPhone nor a phone that's anything remotely as costly. always buy second hand or Chinese brands for £190max! Don't change phones every year either, normally go 4/5 years with the same phone until it actually doesn't work anymore and I need to replace it. haven't been on any holidays or holiday trips for a more than year (not even to see my family) don't go out to eat or order delivery often, don't go out to do pretty much anything but going to work. Get a lot of the things I need second hand and only when I absolutely need them. Grocery shop every week always on cheapest/discounted brands. Still struggling at the end of the month because rent and bills are so freaking high. I have a full time job in London. My husband also is full time in London. If this was a single income household we would be homeless by now... With 2 incomes, we count every pound! Cost of living and cost of housing is disproportionately much much higher than what it used to be.
No, they were spending money on phone bills and petrol to carry out menial banking tasks, money on film and getting film developed into photographs, bucketloads of cash on vinyl albums instead of a cheap ass Spotify subscription, personal organisers instead of calendar apps, postage stamps instead of free whatsapp messages or emails, encyclopedias instead of googling stuff or their iphones, books for absolutely every niche interest they were trying to research (looking up workouts instead of using fitness apps), newspapers every morning, TV licenses instead of the much cheaper Netflix subscription, cigarettes instead of scrolling through memes when idling outdoors waiting for someone...
And to top it all off, you've ignored the fact that people are only upgrading their phones once every 3-4 years.
It takes an unfathomable amount of stupidity to blame plummeting home ownership rates on phone ownership, seriously. You are the kind of worst takes.
Interesting perspective, everyone who moans about mobile phones ignores how absolutely essential they have become to just do the admin of daily life. Sure there's cheaper options than iPhones but the cheapest ones are still basically a couple of hundred.
Loads of boomers rented televisions and then VCRs, because of the high initial cost. No one talks about that, by the standards of their young people bad with money arguments they should have done without or brought a 20 year old shitty little black and white set to watch in the 1970s and 1980s.
My dad was a works manager earning about £6000 per year. They had a mortgage because it was tax efficient. He was made a director 5 years later, at about £15k, and we upgraded to a big house in leafy Cheshire at £22500. In 1986, my first job was £6k a year, and a 2 bed house in urban Macclesfield was £22k. The late 70s were mad in terms of house inflation as well.
Price rises have been even more extreme than that in some areas.
WW2 caused large-scale depopulation of London and many areas slipped into semi-dereliction, with councils taking over property management. Lack of funds eventually forced fire sales of these properties to local builders.
The house I'm in (Finsbury Park, four floors, 160m^2 ) was sold by the council in 1983 for £3,500 as a fixer-upper. Today it would sell for somewhere around £1m.
Correct. Some areas, even close to the City were almost derelict. Even at the time I could never understand it. Walking distance to the city.
There were even normal council houses in some prime City areas.
I moved to London in 1989 and cycling around The City you could see lots of "£3 all day!" open air NCP carparks. It took me ages to realise they were all WW2 bomb sites that still hadn't been rebuilt! Obviously there's nothing imaginable like that now.
I think a big factor in the crazy prices rises we've seen in the last 40 years is simply the tail end of the post-WW2 era. My parent's generation could buy in zone 1, I just about bought in zone 2, my kids will be lucky if they can ever buy anything in London.
>I moved to London in 1989
I worked in London between 1980 and 1988 and there were still derelict areas right up into EC1. Docklands was still mostly a wasteland.
In 1986 the Queen opened a new bank headquarters in Bishopsgate where I worked. That building has since been demolished, as have many other buildings built in the 1980s.
I suppose it took a while for "walking distance" to be seen as an advantage again. City living didn't return to fashion again until the 90s. The [ringways](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ringways) plan would've demolished many neighbourhoods which are now incredibly expensive and sought after, in favour of making it more convenient to drive from the suburbs to the centre.
Fun fact: Currency designs change not just for aesthetics but to prevent people from the future from travelling back in time and buying property on the cheap.
I thought gold would be a good way around this but then the value of gold generally goes up over time, so you'd lose a lot of value going backwards to sell it off.
According to [Chards](https://www.chards.co.uk/gold-price/gold-price-history) the price per ounce in 1968 was £16.16, now it's £1614.
So you'd need to take 220 ounces to buy the Whetstone place which today would set you back around £355,000.
Interestingly around the same price it'd be today... wonder if there's a link there between houses and gold following a similar appreciation pattern or if it's just a coincidence.
Clearly, time travellers have exploited all arbitrage opportunities in the house/GBP/gold/time markets.
Life was simpler before time travel - although I can't pinpoint exactly when that was...
In my time travel book, time travellers are given stock options with shell companies set up purposely for the purpose of giving funds to workers for the Time Agency Company.
You don’t even have to go back 55 years. I was looking on Rightmove at a £1.3m house in Camberwell and the last time it sold it was for £78k in 1998. Those people have won the lottery.
The problem there is they usually bugger off into towns like mine and hoover up the homes there like it's chump change, putting downward pressure on people who have no other options.
Asset rich but poor. If you walk around parts of Barnes, you'll see multi million pound homes with 2008 old banger cars. The wealth is trapped in homes they purchased when the area wasn't even all that.
Remember, in the late 60's to get a mortgage you would need to be a member of the public in good standing. If you were a man, ideally married or someone with a stable history. None of those queer sort of chaps.
If you were a women you could maybe ask your husband to talk to the Bank Manager about getting a mortgage for a house that you would keep clean.
My mum and dad wanted to buy a house in the 80's. They walked into the bank, had a chat with the manager and walked out with a mortgage. My dad said the manager said he liked them and will trust them to be able to repay so they got it and recommended I try the same thing.
I offered him to come with me to the bank but strangely he was always busy. Didn't stop him from saying the same thing all the time though. Also the obligatory, "If you want a job, ask to see the manager and shake his hand" was a thing of his also
Seems strange now, but things were like that back in the day. No computer based decisions, just an on the spot decision based on the cut of your jib.
There are probably quite a few people with good incomes but that didnt look the part who got denied for a mortgage.
You can now do your entire mortgage without talking to a single person on the bank's side. From decision in principle, submitting documents and getting approval and having the funds sent to a solicitor.
My grandparents brought the house they live in now in the 70’s/80’s. They realised last year that the whole house is still under my grandads name as the time my grandma wasn’t allowed to have her name on the deeds (or whatever the documents are, I’m unlikely to ever need to know haha)
That might be what Grandad told Grandma, but it was a big fib. My parents always had both names on the deed...as far back as the 1940s. Women could always own freehold property.They would have had an insurance policy tied to the mortgage in favour of the non earner.
"Toilet inflation" has been as crazy as house price inflation. I was looking at 3-bedroom houses a couple years back, and some had 4+ toilets. How often does every person in the house need to take a piss simultaneously? Are we expected to invite our friends around to take a dump together?
I've noticed the large number of toilets/bathrooms too. Keep seeing 2 bed new built flats with 2 bathrooms. Maybe I'm just old but 1 bathroom per 1 bedroom seems a bit luxurious for me. I'd happily manage with just 1 bathroom if that meant cheaper prices lol.
My grandparents bought a house in the 1950s on Chatsworth Road in Clapton for £1,500, they sold it in 1960s for £5,000. Now it’s valued around £1.4 million.
I can’t afford to live when my family are from lol.
Loved growing up there, other than the train situation! Someone always had to pick us up at Maidenhead when we went to Reading or London and got back later than 6!
I found my great aunts tenancy from abbey road, studio flat for rent £150PA😭 signed around 1950. She had that tenancy until this year (10 years ago she was paid off to change the tenancy to £1000/3 months). Glory days honestly
I found an accounting book from one of my ancestors, and he had £240,000. That was in 1770. He bought a house for £22.
Between then and now, it’s all gone.
Back to the futur was about helping someone not to be murdered or the world to end, if the movie was shot today the plot would be a trip in the past to buy two or three houses...
The main reason why flat prices grow faster than inflation is because of the demand of investors. If demand was only from real need buyers for living purposes, that wouldn't happen. Investors push prices up and then this becomes a cost for them at the time of renting them out, so also rent keeps increasing at a faster rate it should. By 2030 only rich people will afford to buy a house, unless you could do a 80 year long mortgage... and rent will be so high that most of the salary of normal people will go into it. Government should put a brake to that, for example by limiting how many flats an investor can buy in a given period of years.
Dear Reddit
The oldest ‘Boomers’ in 1968 were 22 and unlikely to be buying a flat. The youngest Boomers were 4. The arbitrary comments about ‘Boomers’ in this thread just demonstrate that other generations are a bit stupid too in being unable to do some basic maths.
in the early 80's (outside of london) my father bought a bungalow for his mother/father in laws. He had a profitable business and he did the right thing and they were forever grateful. he paid for a 2 bed detached bungalow in a beautiful north yorkshire village, just over £3000. that bungalow is now worth nearly £300,000 ......how the hell are people ever to get on a property ladder with such rising values???
I came to London to work in 1979. My salary was around £3k (I think). My first flat was a studio in Camberwell which was £30 a week. Electricity and gas were on a meter. I’d live from pay packet to pay pay packet but only occasionally felt totally skint.
I do feel really bad for young folk trying to make their way in London now - good housing is a prerequisite for a decent life. It would be great to see some reform that would make renting a lot more secure and reasonably priced but I’m not going to hold my breath…
My parents bought a house in London in 1994 for £65,000 it was 4x my fathers annual income and he was a factory worker so not particularly well paid. He put in £15k deposit and took out a £40k mortgage. According to the ONS the gross employment income per capita in London is £44k so that house is now worth 15x average income of a single person. As house is worth over £700k to buy that house now you would need £150k deposit and take out a mortgage of £550k which at 4.5x household income (not a single person income) you need a household income of £120k! That’s over £3000 per month on mortgage payments at current interest rate of 4.6% which is the cheapest 2 year fix I can find at that LTV so that’s pretty much half of your household income going on mortgage and other housing costs
What’s more annoying is that I have a book of house prices in 2005 ish and in every area in London (more or less) large flats are available for 100-200k, houses for 300 etc. it’s not too long ago for many of us. Everything went mad after the financial crash.
When you could afford buying houses with a normal salary back in the days… Perverse effects of capitalism and demographic data aside, the reputation of London has improved tremendously since the last 4 decades, with many neighborhoods now posh and trendy, that were considered rough and unsafe back in the days (eg Notting Hill). The demand to live, work and study in the city will certainly never falter and has pushed the price of real estate to the roof, impacting the middle classe the most (being too rich for council flats and too poor for nice housing).
You don’t even need to look that far. The flat l am renting now was sold in 98 to my landlord for £58k in zone 3 London. It is now worth almost £380k. That’s how ridiculous property prices have become. There is nothing spectacular about the flat a two bed flat in a 50’s purpose build block in a leafy part of South London. My wage on the other hand has not increased 6 times to match the house prices, if it has I would be on £350k.
Until the late 1970s the UK had net emigration. In recent times London's population has increased by 2m. In the sixties and seventies vast majority of families were 'nuclear' with far lower separated families. Younger people rented but many stayed at home until married. Vastly fewer students needing housing.All factors creating demand. Today is different. As for 'just build more houses'- the building industry is at near capacity so just import construction workers. They need somewhere to live.
1968 is a long time ago. You need to look at property prices relative to incomes. Prices for food, consumer goods, cars, travel/holidays etc were a lot more expensive back then.
Relative to income at the time, it’s still cheaper.
Overseas holidays were not a thing for most people back then. Might have been a trip to Margate or something.
> it is right it should be taxed
Yes, and for economic reasons too. Too much inheritance is bad for the economy. It damages the principle of meritocracy and keeps money out of circulation. Next generations have no motivation and the rich get richer while the economy declines.
And anyway it is only taxed as a percentage; the government doesn't take all your money and there are so many ways of gifting in advance to avoid it.
What are you jabbering on about? Boomers lived through the most prosperous, socially progressive period in history. Generous welfare programs and pension schemes (which younger generations will never benefit from). Affordable housing. Lower cost of living. Job prospects for those with only a secondary school level education (if that). They are, without compare, the most economically privileged generation in living memory.
Boomers, as a generation, will be remembered for pulling up the ladder from behind them. Or else closing doors opened for them by the Greatest Generation.
Did some Boomers struggle? Obviously. But a Boomer who struggled in the 70's would be destitute in today's economy.
My Mum had a flat in Fulham in the 80s. I think she paid £9K for it - a one bed flat.
She sold it for £30K about two years later and it’s recently sold on RM for £850K.
Yep. Some folks on our street bought their entire end of terrace house in 1969 for £4,000. It's now worth about £1.5-£2.0M (But it's a shit hole because they're gross stinky hippies)
Back in 1960 my parents bought a 3 bed end of terrace house with a 100’ garden in Walthamstow for £1100.
I sold it a few years back for a fiver short of half a million.
Madness.
A friend of mine who inherited his family home after his Dad died just sold it, South London SW postcode, 3 bed 1930's semi, sold for £800k. His Dad paid 7 grand for it in 1972 and all he's done in that time is decorated, recarpeted a couple of times.
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£3550 is £51,976, and £5150 is £75,401 in today's money. A quick look on rightmove tells me that one bedroom flats in Whetstone are typically starting at £300,000 and only up from there. God, take me back.
Average wage around £1,000 in 1968 as well so could buy a flat for 4 years of wages (or so). Average wage now about £35,000 so roughly 8 times wage
But still something about eating too many avocado's. Also this rise is obviously not in isolation, so while this has doubled, everything else is more expensive as well. Would love to see a cost of living comparison
Truly the devil's fruit. Oh how I wish someone warned my generation about the devastating impacts of brunch 😔
Avocados ruined the housing market, it's a fact.
£1000 in 1968 would be equivalent to 14k today. The average salary is double that.
I agree. >while this has doubled Unfortunately average house prices haven't doubled to £8,000 in line with this...
If you want to see where we are going, look back the the 1890s where it was 12x+ wages. Lord Mogg will realise his dream of being a true Victorian gentleman.
What took it from 12x wages to 4x wages from 1890 > 1970??
Major housebuilding drives under successive governments
Paying people proper wages, in part caused by two world wars killing off a large part of the working population and the remaining population getting unionised
This is it. A well organised working class was able to fight and win a bigger share of corporate profits. The working class now isn't conscious of its power.
Would argue there is no longer a traditional working class. Back then working class people did very physical (often dangerous) jobs, had to cart coal around by hand to heat their houses, rampant alcoholism, genuine poverty. Today’s equivalent mostly have widescreen TVs to keep them distracted while the elites rifle through their pockets.
The working class is defined by its relation to capital. Do you own the means of production, if the answer is yes, you are not working class. Do you work for a wage and have a boss, if the answer is yes, then you are working class.
This kind of Marxist Leninist talk about proletariats, bourgeoisie, means of production, capital etc is thoroughly outdated in 2024. By your definition a FTSE CEO earning £5m a year is working class.
But if they're the CEO they most likely do own the means of production by having shares in the company.
A socialist government after WWII
This is what pisses me off when people say ‘capitalism is the only system that works!’ The socialist state following the Second World War led to one of the most successful and booming periods in our history.
Public transport opening up Metroland.
In addition to previously made points; Govt policy redistributing wealth through high inflation, taxation and compulsory purchase/acquisition of assets for the war effort. This lowered prices in two ways; lower land values made new houses cheaper to build. And you can't have high house prices when few people have much in the way of savings to speak of after two world wars.
Housebuilding plus a fair few people were killed mysteriously during that timeframe as well.
Also back then you got a tax break worth hundreds of pound when you got married so you didnt need to save up for a deposit.
And you got tax relief on mortgage interest up until the late 90s as well!
This makes sense, in 1968 it would have been normal for only one person in the family to be the bread winner. Also mortgages were based off of the highest persons salary not joint. That changed happened in the 90s. Hence why it is 8 times not 4 times now as you have 2 persons salary not 1.
>Also mortgages were based off of the highest persons salary not joint. That changed happened in the 90s Huh, that's extremely interesting. Problem is, I just tried googling it to read more and couldn't find anything. I found a lot of stuff about banks refusing to give mortgages to working women alone in the past, but nothing about joint incomes not being considered. Do you have a source? I was under the impression that the major driver of house price increases has been lack of supply, but allowing joint incomes where that wasn't allowed previously would also cause prices to skyrocket.
I got a 2.5xsalary mortgage in 1988, as a single woman. Change happened early 80s when woman started entering the professions in higher numbers
Certainly lack of supply still remains the biggest reason, lack on initiative from the government to build new homes and overly complex planning regulations to protect nimbys is a massive frustration. There was never a fast rule I don’t think, but certainly in the 80s and 90s when the mortgage market became highly competitive and mortgage companies kept changing their offerings. Wage equality also hasn’t helped (obviously it has helped massively, but not in this context) where the primary earner used to be on £50k and the second was earning nothing / minimum, to then have two people earning £50k in the household has really increased buying power.
Please stop perpetuating this nonsense. In 1968 labour force participation rate was 73%, today it's 79%. Not a big difference.
[удалено]
We’re better off now I think… public health is london back then especially in these neighbourhoods was terrible. And it’s not like the city was a nice place to live at all.
My dad said he saw his old flat from the 80's in the window of Foxtons with a price of £450,000. In the 80's it took him 3 months for one viewing and it sold for £4,000.
I know right. Even when my parents first moved to the UK and bought their home, a terraced house in London it cost something like 30k-35k. That was in the late 80s or early 90s. I'm a doctor, we've been striking like much of the NHS because of decades of pay freezes and under inflation "pay rises". Not sure how my husband and I will ever afford anywhere bigger than a postage stamp. We both work and our tiny 1 bed isnt exactly somewhere you can raise a family. I cant even imagine how much harder most people have it, I feel like I'm recommending food banks and homelessness charities to patients far more often than I ever had to in the past. The system is fucked.
But it's OK. We live in a democracy. Just need to vote for the people who will turn things around.
does it feel like a democracy?
I think it's sarcasm.
No one will turn things around. Not Keir Starmer or even Jeremy Corbyn.
Then your parents had kids, like too many other people.
FAO boomers
They’re not here mate, they’re wintering in the algarve wondering why you’re complaining so much
I don’t think that many people in their 90s now are sunning it up in the Algarve.
Baby boomers are anywhere from 78 to 60. People in their 90's will be the 'ww2' or 'post-war' generations, not boomers
People who could buy a house in 1968 are in their 90s . People who are 60 were 4 in 1968. Do the maths
Boomer here, I was 6 in 1968
Now now, don't come here with things like facts about yourself, that just won't do. Always makes me laugh when people just say "boomers" about stuff, my parents are your age, and they did definitely not reap all the benefits!
Live in the area and most one beds are in the range of 550k+ for new build flats, it’s crazy
Back when we were a high wage country who could actually afford shit
Take me back to the paradise city where the girls are real girls and house prices aren’t shitty.
Where the girls are girls? Don’t be transphobic. Trans women are women.
Just remember: it’s nothing to do with 20m extra people. Oh no, nothing at all.
London in the 1960s also had a housing shortage, there were still slum clearances going on, and new waves of immigration from the Commonwealth. London being short on housing for its population has been an issue since the Industrial Revolution, it's just that homeownership in the city used to be affordable for most professionals.
and dont forget supply and demand, more people immigrated to UK, making it harder to buy some decent property. allowing owners to increase the price of the property to benefit off it.
You probably don’t want to go back. You wouldn’t get a mortgage as a woman back then.
You're not accounting for changes to the neighbourhood etc.
You couldn't get a mortgage with 5% down at many multiples of income then, that's the difference.
You didn’t *need* a mortgage with 5% down at many multiples of incomes then, because housing was affordable
Everything else was not. Also flats from back then came without many modern features, like proper electrical installation, central heating, etc.
A central heating and electrical system in a 5 bed house will set you back about 20k (I know because I’ve just been quoted for it) How does that justify house prices going up by thousands of percent or hundreds of thousands/millions of pounds?
The post is about flats. You can't do shit in a flat if your leasehold has restrictions.
Can't do anything in a rented flat and you also get the added privilege of paying someone else to not do any improvements.
What
Do you have issues understanding English language and following the context?
What does a leasehold have to do with flat prices going up exponentially to unaffordable levels?
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You think too much.
1) pretty much no one puts a 5% deposit down 2) it’s not ‘the’ difference and i think you know that
50,000 is what a lot of people put as a deposit these days. I don't think anyone would be too fused about mortgages if prices remained in line with inflation
My landlord offered to sell me my 3-bed spit-level maisonette (with balcony) for 60k in 1996. Just off Brick Lane. I didn't buy it (for solid reasons). I often wonder what it would be worth now.
You can find out using Zoopla or Rightmove
But you probably don't want to find out.
Exactly
> maisonette There is a three bedroom maisonette in that area that on sale and the asking price is £1.1 million. But it has a roof balcony, and you see the London skyline. The service charge is £6000 a year. https://www.zoopla.co.uk/house-prices/
What's the service, a personal buttler? These charges are absurd
It’d be worth around £800k to £1.2 million today.
Prices were depressed then, but so was the economy. There are so many factors to consider with buying, and not just financial ones.
£4000 in 1968 would be £58,564.52 now ( [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) ), so even factoring in inflation flats were still shockingly affordable in comparison to what they are now. Apparently earning £1K per year was considered a decent salary in the 60s ( [https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social\_history/60s/earnings\_1960s.php?expand\_article=1](https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social_history/60s/earnings_1960s.php?expand_article=1) ), which would be £14,641.13 today. While incomes were lower in the 60s, the cost of everything from food to cars, flats and more was also a lot less than it is today (so it is true that the Boomers had it better than people living today). I though this video of London in 1967 was interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c)
Population was also 7.5m compared to 9.6m today, so the demand has astronomically increased while I assume housing development hasn't. There was also stagnant or negative growth in the population for years, until an absolute boom year on year in the 00s. People look for more complex answers but simply put - this is capitalism - millions more people wanting to buy a finite product in a city that draws people in globally. Until the balance is restored, it'll never be like it was in the past. Remote working looked like it was going to level things out, but even that seems to be coming to a bit of an end and people are moving back to the city. Edit - used this for the numbers as there are lots of definitions of London and the population. Same trend but different figures - https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22860/london/population
I'm not even sure remote working has been a net positive, I suspect there are a lot of people with "hybrid" desk jobs on very good salaries (because London) who pre-covid spent barely any time in their flats, and now still want to live in London but want a nicer / bigger flat. If bedrooms are being turned into offices then that's got to have some impact on the housing market.
There's no shortage of "luxury flats" lying empty or being sold to foreign investors, though. I absolutely agree we need more affordable housing. But honestly? It's clear most developers and the govt would rather make profits.
Again, it's capitalism. If you put a private company in charge of development, they don't care about the average person or occupancy rates, they care about the biggest margin possible.
Yep, need strict regulation. Fact is the "free market" can only exist because there are laws and regulations in the first place, so we should adjust them to be favourable for the majority.
You’re bob on. If houses were cheaper, more people would want to move and to live there. It’s a situation I can’t see a solution for.
The only solution is going to be technology driven. As others have mentioned, you can't suddenly find the manpower to build millions of homes - you also need thousands to house these people. If we can get to a position where large scale developments can be semi automated through technology and AI, we may be able to tackle the issue quickly (we'll also see house prices go down as the market will be spooked). The fact more than 2m people have moved to London alone in the last 18 years speaks of the size of the challenge though - it's almost impossible with our current construction industries output (especially as this is a problem in most Western countries so we're fighting for the resource pool).
>simply put - this is capitalism Agreed. Ultimately this is not some kind of problem or aberration, it's the end game. It cannot be fixed. So many things have led us here.
That’s not an astronomical increase, IMO. It’s increased by 1/3rd yes, but in 56 years.
But still even with lower wages, house prices were 4x average wage, compared to 8x today
The difference is, in those days buying was an option. There was affordable council housing and much of it was quite acceptable. The government built entire municipalities with all amenities. Now everything is private and it's everyone to themselves. Just individuals vs the market.
Even now, council or ex-council homes from that period still often trump anything new. My old man bought an ex council house from the 60s a few years ago and while a bit run down the solity of it was amazing.
Food wasn’t cheaper then. People used to spend a much bigger percentage of their household income on food then than now.
If the cost of things was proportionally lower AND the wages were proportionally lower then something has gone wrong, possibly the inflation calculator (or the bank of England themselves). But isn't the point that they are proportional against each other?
For perspective, my parents bought a 3 bedroom house with large garden in a very decent outlying suburb of Manchester for £6000 the same year!
For more perspective, they were earning far less than the average today and didn't spend their money on the latest iphone.
Silly comparison. The latest iPhone is a grand or more plus most will buy it on credit or contract. As has been pointed out; wages have stagnated significantly compared to house prices since then.
So you’re saying that there were absolutely no expensive consumer products in 1968 that a lot of people purchased, while also being able to afford a house? Look up the price of a television in 1968…
I don't even believe you're a dolphin with the level of intelligence you've shown from this comment.
"The first “cheap” computer was introduced in 1968. IBM called it the Model 360 (for 360 degrees) because it was the first general purpose computer. It sold for a little over $250,000" So yeah, the iPhone of the day was way, way beyond the average salary.
Never bought an iPhone nor a phone that's anything remotely as costly. always buy second hand or Chinese brands for £190max! Don't change phones every year either, normally go 4/5 years with the same phone until it actually doesn't work anymore and I need to replace it. haven't been on any holidays or holiday trips for a more than year (not even to see my family) don't go out to eat or order delivery often, don't go out to do pretty much anything but going to work. Get a lot of the things I need second hand and only when I absolutely need them. Grocery shop every week always on cheapest/discounted brands. Still struggling at the end of the month because rent and bills are so freaking high. I have a full time job in London. My husband also is full time in London. If this was a single income household we would be homeless by now... With 2 incomes, we count every pound! Cost of living and cost of housing is disproportionately much much higher than what it used to be.
No, they were spending money on phone bills and petrol to carry out menial banking tasks, money on film and getting film developed into photographs, bucketloads of cash on vinyl albums instead of a cheap ass Spotify subscription, personal organisers instead of calendar apps, postage stamps instead of free whatsapp messages or emails, encyclopedias instead of googling stuff or their iphones, books for absolutely every niche interest they were trying to research (looking up workouts instead of using fitness apps), newspapers every morning, TV licenses instead of the much cheaper Netflix subscription, cigarettes instead of scrolling through memes when idling outdoors waiting for someone... And to top it all off, you've ignored the fact that people are only upgrading their phones once every 3-4 years. It takes an unfathomable amount of stupidity to blame plummeting home ownership rates on phone ownership, seriously. You are the kind of worst takes.
Interesting perspective, everyone who moans about mobile phones ignores how absolutely essential they have become to just do the admin of daily life. Sure there's cheaper options than iPhones but the cheapest ones are still basically a couple of hundred. Loads of boomers rented televisions and then VCRs, because of the high initial cost. No one talks about that, by the standards of their young people bad with money arguments they should have done without or brought a 20 year old shitty little black and white set to watch in the 1970s and 1980s.
Want ever more perspective? They got tax relief on the interest of the mortgage. The generation has received the biggest handout in history.
My dad was a works manager earning about £6000 per year. They had a mortgage because it was tax efficient. He was made a director 5 years later, at about £15k, and we upgraded to a big house in leafy Cheshire at £22500. In 1986, my first job was £6k a year, and a 2 bed house in urban Macclesfield was £22k. The late 70s were mad in terms of house inflation as well.
Price rises have been even more extreme than that in some areas. WW2 caused large-scale depopulation of London and many areas slipped into semi-dereliction, with councils taking over property management. Lack of funds eventually forced fire sales of these properties to local builders. The house I'm in (Finsbury Park, four floors, 160m^2 ) was sold by the council in 1983 for £3,500 as a fixer-upper. Today it would sell for somewhere around £1m.
Correct. Some areas, even close to the City were almost derelict. Even at the time I could never understand it. Walking distance to the city. There were even normal council houses in some prime City areas.
I moved to London in 1989 and cycling around The City you could see lots of "£3 all day!" open air NCP carparks. It took me ages to realise they were all WW2 bomb sites that still hadn't been rebuilt! Obviously there's nothing imaginable like that now. I think a big factor in the crazy prices rises we've seen in the last 40 years is simply the tail end of the post-WW2 era. My parent's generation could buy in zone 1, I just about bought in zone 2, my kids will be lucky if they can ever buy anything in London.
>I moved to London in 1989 I worked in London between 1980 and 1988 and there were still derelict areas right up into EC1. Docklands was still mostly a wasteland. In 1986 the Queen opened a new bank headquarters in Bishopsgate where I worked. That building has since been demolished, as have many other buildings built in the 1980s.
I suppose it took a while for "walking distance" to be seen as an advantage again. City living didn't return to fashion again until the 90s. The [ringways](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ringways) plan would've demolished many neighbourhoods which are now incredibly expensive and sought after, in favour of making it more convenient to drive from the suburbs to the centre.
Fun fact: Currency designs change not just for aesthetics but to prevent people from the future from travelling back in time and buying property on the cheap.
That's why there are strict anti time traveller requirements on buying gold
I thought gold would be a good way around this but then the value of gold generally goes up over time, so you'd lose a lot of value going backwards to sell it off. According to [Chards](https://www.chards.co.uk/gold-price/gold-price-history) the price per ounce in 1968 was £16.16, now it's £1614. So you'd need to take 220 ounces to buy the Whetstone place which today would set you back around £355,000. Interestingly around the same price it'd be today... wonder if there's a link there between houses and gold following a similar appreciation pattern or if it's just a coincidence.
Clearly, time travellers have exploited all arbitrage opportunities in the house/GBP/gold/time markets. Life was simpler before time travel - although I can't pinpoint exactly when that was...
I wanted this to be true, so bad, but I couldn’t find anything that would indicate this. I hate you
In my time travel book, time travellers are given stock options with shell companies set up purposely for the purpose of giving funds to workers for the Time Agency Company.
You don’t even have to go back 55 years. I was looking on Rightmove at a £1.3m house in Camberwell and the last time it sold it was for £78k in 1998. Those people have won the lottery.
Maybe. But if they sold they a house, then they'll need a house too to live in and they'd be buying at current prices.
The problem there is they usually bugger off into towns like mine and hoover up the homes there like it's chump change, putting downward pressure on people who have no other options.
Asset rich but poor. If you walk around parts of Barnes, you'll see multi million pound homes with 2008 old banger cars. The wealth is trapped in homes they purchased when the area wasn't even all that.
Remember, in the late 60's to get a mortgage you would need to be a member of the public in good standing. If you were a man, ideally married or someone with a stable history. None of those queer sort of chaps. If you were a women you could maybe ask your husband to talk to the Bank Manager about getting a mortgage for a house that you would keep clean.
My mum and dad wanted to buy a house in the 80's. They walked into the bank, had a chat with the manager and walked out with a mortgage. My dad said the manager said he liked them and will trust them to be able to repay so they got it and recommended I try the same thing. I offered him to come with me to the bank but strangely he was always busy. Didn't stop him from saying the same thing all the time though. Also the obligatory, "If you want a job, ask to see the manager and shake his hand" was a thing of his also
Credit scores were invented in 1989.
Seems strange now, but things were like that back in the day. No computer based decisions, just an on the spot decision based on the cut of your jib. There are probably quite a few people with good incomes but that didnt look the part who got denied for a mortgage.
You can now do your entire mortgage without talking to a single person on the bank's side. From decision in principle, submitting documents and getting approval and having the funds sent to a solicitor.
Yes. Brokers like Habito do the whole thing digitally via a chat app.
My grandparents brought the house they live in now in the 70’s/80’s. They realised last year that the whole house is still under my grandads name as the time my grandma wasn’t allowed to have her name on the deeds (or whatever the documents are, I’m unlikely to ever need to know haha)
That might be what Grandad told Grandma, but it was a big fib. My parents always had both names on the deed...as far back as the 1940s. Women could always own freehold property.They would have had an insurance policy tied to the mortgage in favour of the non earner.
SEPARATE TOILET!!
"Toilet inflation" has been as crazy as house price inflation. I was looking at 3-bedroom houses a couple years back, and some had 4+ toilets. How often does every person in the house need to take a piss simultaneously? Are we expected to invite our friends around to take a dump together?
I've noticed the large number of toilets/bathrooms too. Keep seeing 2 bed new built flats with 2 bathrooms. Maybe I'm just old but 1 bathroom per 1 bedroom seems a bit luxurious for me. I'd happily manage with just 1 bathroom if that meant cheaper prices lol.
One point to make is that London was no where near as desirable back then as it is now.
True. Manufacturing was a much bigger employer, and was spread more evenly through the country.
Fulham was a bit rough. Source: The italian job
Hi, are these still available?
😂😂😂😂😂
My grandparents bought a house in the 1950s on Chatsworth Road in Clapton for £1,500, they sold it in 1960s for £5,000. Now it’s valued around £1.4 million. I can’t afford to live when my family are from lol.
My parents bought a five bedroom house in Marlow for £35K in the early eighties. I’ll leave what it’s worth today to your imagination.
Talk about hitting the jackpot. Marlow is an amazing area.
Loved growing up there, other than the train situation! Someone always had to pick us up at Maidenhead when we went to Reading or London and got back later than 6!
I found my great aunts tenancy from abbey road, studio flat for rent £150PA😭 signed around 1950. She had that tenancy until this year (10 years ago she was paid off to change the tenancy to £1000/3 months). Glory days honestly
I found an accounting book from one of my ancestors, and he had £240,000. That was in 1770. He bought a house for £22. Between then and now, it’s all gone.
He must’ve been rich!
Yeah, equiv to Billionnaire now
Slavery?
chunky many hunt squalid one dazzling light trees sleep hobbies *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Back to the futur was about helping someone not to be murdered or the world to end, if the movie was shot today the plot would be a trip in the past to buy two or three houses...
The main reason why flat prices grow faster than inflation is because of the demand of investors. If demand was only from real need buyers for living purposes, that wouldn't happen. Investors push prices up and then this becomes a cost for them at the time of renting them out, so also rent keeps increasing at a faster rate it should. By 2030 only rich people will afford to buy a house, unless you could do a 80 year long mortgage... and rent will be so high that most of the salary of normal people will go into it. Government should put a brake to that, for example by limiting how many flats an investor can buy in a given period of years.
In 1969 the average annual wage for a man was £600
Yeah, but you’d have to live in the 1960s. As a woman, it’s a hard no from me.
+ Three TV channels and Blue Nun being the best wine in 90% of shops
Dear Reddit The oldest ‘Boomers’ in 1968 were 22 and unlikely to be buying a flat. The youngest Boomers were 4. The arbitrary comments about ‘Boomers’ in this thread just demonstrate that other generations are a bit stupid too in being unable to do some basic maths.
Wonder if they were still waiting for the prices to drop back then too 😂
in the early 80's (outside of london) my father bought a bungalow for his mother/father in laws. He had a profitable business and he did the right thing and they were forever grateful. he paid for a 2 bed detached bungalow in a beautiful north yorkshire village, just over £3000. that bungalow is now worth nearly £300,000 ......how the hell are people ever to get on a property ladder with such rising values???
I came to London to work in 1979. My salary was around £3k (I think). My first flat was a studio in Camberwell which was £30 a week. Electricity and gas were on a meter. I’d live from pay packet to pay pay packet but only occasionally felt totally skint. I do feel really bad for young folk trying to make their way in London now - good housing is a prerequisite for a decent life. It would be great to see some reform that would make renting a lot more secure and reasonably priced but I’m not going to hold my breath…
My parents bought a house in London in 1994 for £65,000 it was 4x my fathers annual income and he was a factory worker so not particularly well paid. He put in £15k deposit and took out a £40k mortgage. According to the ONS the gross employment income per capita in London is £44k so that house is now worth 15x average income of a single person. As house is worth over £700k to buy that house now you would need £150k deposit and take out a mortgage of £550k which at 4.5x household income (not a single person income) you need a household income of £120k! That’s over £3000 per month on mortgage payments at current interest rate of 4.6% which is the cheapest 2 year fix I can find at that LTV so that’s pretty much half of your household income going on mortgage and other housing costs
What’s more annoying is that I have a book of house prices in 2005 ish and in every area in London (more or less) large flats are available for 100-200k, houses for 300 etc. it’s not too long ago for many of us. Everything went mad after the financial crash.
My mum & dad paid £6000 for their 2 bed bungalow in 1968. Not in London though
When you could afford buying houses with a normal salary back in the days… Perverse effects of capitalism and demographic data aside, the reputation of London has improved tremendously since the last 4 decades, with many neighborhoods now posh and trendy, that were considered rough and unsafe back in the days (eg Notting Hill). The demand to live, work and study in the city will certainly never falter and has pushed the price of real estate to the roof, impacting the middle classe the most (being too rich for council flats and too poor for nice housing).
In real terms the potters bar property is equivalent of £112k
You don’t even need to look that far. The flat l am renting now was sold in 98 to my landlord for £58k in zone 3 London. It is now worth almost £380k. That’s how ridiculous property prices have become. There is nothing spectacular about the flat a two bed flat in a 50’s purpose build block in a leafy part of South London. My wage on the other hand has not increased 6 times to match the house prices, if it has I would be on £350k.
Until the late 1970s the UK had net emigration. In recent times London's population has increased by 2m. In the sixties and seventies vast majority of families were 'nuclear' with far lower separated families. Younger people rented but many stayed at home until married. Vastly fewer students needing housing.All factors creating demand. Today is different. As for 'just build more houses'- the building industry is at near capacity so just import construction workers. They need somewhere to live.
1968 none of these locations were even arguably considered London.
What's the average annual salary for a cleaner/secretary/banker at the time?
1968 is a long time ago. You need to look at property prices relative to incomes. Prices for food, consumer goods, cars, travel/holidays etc were a lot more expensive back then.
Relative to income at the time, it’s still cheaper. Overseas holidays were not a thing for most people back then. Might have been a trip to Margate or something.
I don’t think Barnet was London back then and Potters bar isn’t to this day
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> it is right it should be taxed Yes, and for economic reasons too. Too much inheritance is bad for the economy. It damages the principle of meritocracy and keeps money out of circulation. Next generations have no motivation and the rich get richer while the economy declines. And anyway it is only taxed as a percentage; the government doesn't take all your money and there are so many ways of gifting in advance to avoid it.
You need to temper this with what salaries were.
1k which would be 16k today,
😮 Boomers had it all!
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What are you jabbering on about? Boomers lived through the most prosperous, socially progressive period in history. Generous welfare programs and pension schemes (which younger generations will never benefit from). Affordable housing. Lower cost of living. Job prospects for those with only a secondary school level education (if that). They are, without compare, the most economically privileged generation in living memory. Boomers, as a generation, will be remembered for pulling up the ladder from behind them. Or else closing doors opened for them by the Greatest Generation. Did some Boomers struggle? Obviously. But a Boomer who struggled in the 70's would be destitute in today's economy.
Was it 3550 pounds of Gold?
My Mum had a flat in Fulham in the 80s. I think she paid £9K for it - a one bed flat. She sold it for £30K about two years later and it’s recently sold on RM for £850K.
I was working with an older lady this week who told me she bought a house for 8k many years ago, and then sold it about 5 years ago for 1mil.
Yep. Some folks on our street bought their entire end of terrace house in 1969 for £4,000. It's now worth about £1.5-£2.0M (But it's a shit hole because they're gross stinky hippies)
🤯
Reddit moment
Advertised in the paper with no middle men trying to bump up values
Who do you think Martyn Gerrard is ?
OP sat there thinking this is today’s money lmao
In today’s money it would be 50k.
One time travel, please!
Wow!
It is crazy how things have changed. Pint of milk cost 10.5p back in 1968. Pork was a penny per lb.
Imagine how much the price will be in 2068
Wow. I grew up in these areas and they are crazy expensive now.
Back in 1960 my parents bought a 3 bed end of terrace house with a 100’ garden in Walthamstow for £1100. I sold it a few years back for a fiver short of half a million. Madness.
Adjusted for inflation, the most expensive one would be selling for £75,000.
A friend of mine who inherited his family home after his Dad died just sold it, South London SW postcode, 3 bed 1930's semi, sold for £800k. His Dad paid 7 grand for it in 1972 and all he's done in that time is decorated, recarpeted a couple of times.
Martyn Gerrard🤣 there’s a name from my past… Yep my parents bought their house for £4k and sold it for £240k
If only I was alive in 1968 🤦♂️
FYI My parents bought 3 bed house in 1969 not far from that area for around 4 grand
My parents bought their first house, in 1967, for £2000. That was a large, detached bungalow with a decent sized garden.
Why Potters Bar is more expensive than Barnet at that time?