71% of income on rent in London

Lizling

PasturesNew wrote: »

The article said that singles fared worst, with high rents on small flats.

Yup, singles fair worst as in worse than couples or families, but that's only indirectly linked to whether or not the poorest are paying disproportionately more (singles probably being disproportionately the young or very old.)

PasturesNew

Lizling wrote: »

I'm with you on that. The same story's been covered by a lot of sources, but none of the articles are any good. None of the broadsheets have covered it so far.

FindAProperty is a website for estate agents to advertise houses - like Rightmove. It's owned BY estate agents FOR estate agents.... but has never had the appeal/reach that Rightmove has had ... and that p155e5 them off. Their leads are lower quality than the leads from RM too. They are sitting on a stack of data from their website - so this piece is really just badly wrriten Press Release junk to raise their profile, rather than intelligent research based on a true full data set.

Lizling

Pretty sure you're right there Pasturesnew - about it being to raise their profile as well as their site being a bit !!!!!. I'd still be really interested to find out what research they did do.

PasturesNew

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I bought kids into it, as lots of people have them.

And those of us who don't have them get fed up with the constant ... "what if a small child...." being brought into everything.

PasturesNew

Lizling wrote: »

Pretty sure you're right there Pasturesnew - about it being to raise their profile as well as their site being a bit !!!!!. I'd still be really interested to find out what research they did do.

Probably a simple SQL query across the month's downloaded rental adverts..... SELECT RENTAMT FROM RENTALS WHERE Active=YES.

Then grabbed the "average wages" off some Govt website.

And then got a pen out and gave the figures to a meeja studies stoodent on werk expeerientz.

chewmylegoff

The article is a complete load of toss. Most sources say average rent in London is in the region of about £1,000 per month. This article suggests that people earning £35k are paying £25k in rent. They are not.

Try going into a letting agent and renting a property for £2k a month when you earn £3k a month gross. It doesn't work, they expect gross salary to be 2.5x the rent.

1) the average rent for a London property is not £25k

2) the article ignores that most households will have 2 incomes

3) the article ignores the massive amount of house sharing

They may be grossing up the rent to reflect what per tax earning you need to pay it, but if so they should be clearer.

macaque_2

Lizling wrote: »

Just wanted to throw this article out there for debate.

http://money.aol.co.uk/2012/05/08/staggering-rents-swallow-38-of-income

The key bit (to me) is 'Meanwhile things in London are even more bleak, where rent takes up around 71% of income on average and adds up to £25,824 a year.'

If true, I find that absolutely shocking. I knew that 50%-60% of income going on rent wasn't unusual, but 71%!

Is it sustainable?

Totally agree! Apart from the social and personal problems this causes, it also has a serious impact on the economy.

There is no shortage of evidence to show that economic growth gravitates towards stable, well run low tax economies. High rents are the equivalent of a surtax on employment. Countries that don't keep a check on housing costs must inevitably suffer the consequences.

Graham_Devon

PasturesNew wrote: »

And those of us who don't have them get fed up with the constant ... "what if a small child...." being brought into everything.

Oops, well, sorry

Turnbull2000

Just shows that there's lots of scope for large rent rises in the other UK regions. If Londoners can tolerate rent at 70% of single income, so can tenants elsewhere.

shortchanged_2

Turnbull2000 wrote: »

Just shows that there's lots of scope for large rent rises in the other UK regions. If Londoners can tolerate rent at 70% of single income, so can tenants elsewhere.

And I bet the nation of renters would be well chuffed with that. _party_