http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...ng.houseprices
Can't wait till the next boom!
How can it be that Notting Hill, a part of London that 50 years ago was a sewage-sodden, low-rent slum, can now contain a top-floor flat bought 40 years ago for £12,000 and now on the market for £800,000? "It really wasn't an investment," protests its owner, Joy, a recently retired primary-school teacher who understandably does not want her surname widely known. "I was just buying a place to live. In a pretty daggy part of London, too."
How, also, has a motormouth Mancunian former joke writer called Mike Shirley been able to parlay his £6,000 purchase of a two-up, two-down terraced house in 1997 into a buy-to-let portfolio worth £7m? And what, at the other end of the scale, has happened in this country that first-time buyers, to obtain a competitively priced mortgage, need a deposit equivalent to two years' take-home, while locals in Cornish fishing villages must confront an average house price of roughly 11 times their earnings?
The change has been so massive, so far-reaching, and so rapid that it is easy to forget what things were once like. Less than a century ago, only 10% of Britons owned their own homes. Even 30 years ago, half of us were still renting. Now more than 70% of us are homeowners. And most of that 70% have become an awful lot richer, at least on paper: in October 2007, the average house price in Britain was £218,000, more than three times the 1995 level, four times the 1988 level, and roughly 50 times the 1970 level.
According to the housing charity Shelter, in just three decades, from 1971 to 2002, combined housing wealth in Britain spiralled from £44bn to a barely imaginable £2.5tn - that's double the level of pension and life-assurance savings put together. So much money have we made from this unprecedented boom that we've started buying homes not just for ourselves, but for others, too: hundreds of thousands of us are now landlords, holding a total of 1.1m buy-to-let mortgages and ploughing £126bn into investment property since 1997.
How, also, has a motormouth Mancunian former joke writer called Mike Shirley been able to parlay his £6,000 purchase of a two-up, two-down terraced house in 1997 into a buy-to-let portfolio worth £7m? And what, at the other end of the scale, has happened in this country that first-time buyers, to obtain a competitively priced mortgage, need a deposit equivalent to two years' take-home, while locals in Cornish fishing villages must confront an average house price of roughly 11 times their earnings?
The change has been so massive, so far-reaching, and so rapid that it is easy to forget what things were once like. Less than a century ago, only 10% of Britons owned their own homes. Even 30 years ago, half of us were still renting. Now more than 70% of us are homeowners. And most of that 70% have become an awful lot richer, at least on paper: in October 2007, the average house price in Britain was £218,000, more than three times the 1995 level, four times the 1988 level, and roughly 50 times the 1970 level.
According to the housing charity Shelter, in just three decades, from 1971 to 2002, combined housing wealth in Britain spiralled from £44bn to a barely imaginable £2.5tn - that's double the level of pension and life-assurance savings put together. So much money have we made from this unprecedented boom that we've started buying homes not just for ourselves, but for others, too: hundreds of thousands of us are now landlords, holding a total of 1.1m buy-to-let mortgages and ploughing £126bn into investment property since 1997.
Can't wait till the next boom!
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