I feel bad for the people renting in London. Most people I know there simply can't afford buying as it is prohibitively expensive (>300k pounds I think?)
Do you live in London? I live just over an hour outside and most people I know own a house or flat. You buy a 2 bedroom flat here for 150k. Not denying there is a problem, just surprised you’re finding it so hard as a well paid professional
This is the exception not the norm. Most people don't live like this but i have to agree the prices for renting in London are completely crazy and don't even think about buying a house or getting a mortgage.
I really wish i could buy a house in London (renting it out wold pay for the mortgage and some other bits) but there's no way in hell any bank would give me the amount necessary.
Only rich people and the ones that got council housing will ever be able to live/work in London cheaply.
In central London just 600sqft can easily cost you a million pounds... The place I rented when I lived there was a bit smaller and was for sale at 950k asking price.
It's only going to get worse, everything new built in London (very very small studios/1 bed flats) cost about £600k+ in the area I live in. Property developers are laughing.
London has a massive affordable housing shortage. London councils are moving tenants to other cities because of new government limits on state aid for rent payments[1] Earning £35K, expect to spend about 2/3rds of your salary on rent. A 1 or 2 bedroom flat in a 'normal' part of town will cost you at least £1300/$2000 per month.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/24/tory-westminst...
A 2 bed flat for 400K is definitely what I would call expensive housing! It may not be central-London prices but it's certainly high, and unaffordable for many people.
Most young Londoners cannot afford to buy property anywhere near the center of the city any more. I employ several, and see this first hand.
In 2001 I bought a flat for (at the time quite a lot of money!) £200,000. I could just about afford it on a developer salary at the very peak of the dot-com boom. I sold it a few years later. Now that flat is worth about £700,000.
This article is accurate as far as London is concerned.
London doesn't have this problem if I am not mistaken. But housing is very very expensive still. So much that a 3 bedroom 120sqm apartment can be more than 6 million dollars even outside Central London depending on the area.
I don't know about rent for such luxirious flats. There are so few of them that they cannot account for the 40% empty rate that has been claimed. Almost all new housing in London are small 1 and 2 bedroom flats that cost under £1,000,000.
In fairness, comparing the property prices in a fashionable London district with those in a lower income country in deep economic trouble after its property bubble burst (and Ryanair's loss-leader headline fares) isn't the best illustration of how expensive London is.
I mean, you can match those Barcelona prices in nice market towns a short train ride from central London (probably a similar door to door time to many parts of central London to commuting from West Hampstead), which many London workers actually do. They can think about buying in those areas from £75k as well.
But the investment bubble at the high end of the property market is a largely separate phenomenon; middle-class renters are more likely to take advantage of cheap rents from a lazy letting agent managing the investment property of a foreign owner who's not too savvy about what their buy-to-let income should be than they are to be affected by the unoccupied flats in Belgravia not being on the market. For that reason, for £28000 a year I got five large bedrooms, two reception rooms and a garden in a desirable south London suburb three years ago, so I'd expect a pretty impressive[ly located] 2 bed flat for £25000....
Even commuting for almost an hour door to door, housing is very expensive. London has chronic money laundering, an out of control banking sector and a culture of rent seeking. That's why it's expensive.
If you've lived in London for a number of years, you'll realise you need real cash up front to survive here as the transport and accomodation costs are sky high.
My rent for the 3 bed terraced house in South West London I moved into on Saturday could get me a 7 bedroom mansion with several acres of ground near Leeds...
That's not possible, you're not getting a place for 2% of purchase value on the open market. There are no £1mn properties available for £1,666/month, or £500,000 places for £833/month, it's more than double that everywhere in London
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