Should I buy in London or wait?

lisyloo

you might be better off with a small flat, 7 days a week

I have to say that selling my 5-bed detached des res, moving away from all family, friends and hobbies to somewhere that sounds rather anonymous to buy a small flat doesn't appeal.

I do realise I can't have my cake and eat it too - I'm just trying to find the best solution.

I know this is all about ME but leaving it all on the thread as I think there may be some general relevance i.e. the "can't buy anything half decent for less than half a million unless you don't mind living next door to a crack den" problem.

Then there is also cost of a season ticket.

Andy is quite right.
Also we would have 2 season tickets, so for us the equation is different to a single person (we have one of those "together" cards but I don't think we could guarantee to travel together every professional day).

IronWolf

Bermondsey is the cheapest option, but for good reason. The place is full of criminals, I know two people that have lived there in the last couple of years, one was sexually assaulted on her way home one night, the other was held up at knife point and then chased with the guy saying he was going to stab him.

Oh and commuting from Croydon takes nowhere near 2.5hours, you can be in Victoria in about 20 minutes on the fast trains.

Thrugelmir

padington wrote: »

The economy's of the west are still really weak.

High property prices in the UK will do nothing to help either.

barbiedoll

lisyloo wrote: »

Thanks for your help.
I'm wondering though, what's wrong with something like this?

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-29363280.html

I am not looking to make a home here or bring up children. This is jsut a mid-week bolt-hole.
I wouldn't want to live in an area with a crack den next door, but wouldn't a residential area like this be ok?

My feeling is half-a million would be too much and we might have trouble borrowing that as DH has been in business for 5 months only.

Gosh, you really don't want to live on that estate. I work in this area and I have visited the flats on this estate many times. They are unbearably hot in the summer and stuffy in the winter. The rooms are tiny too. You may well have horrible neighbours and the whole estate is crime-ridden, one of my colleagues was mugged for her handbag there last winter and another had her phone snatched out of her hand by a kid riding past on a bike. I have to visit (alone), and walk through lots of council estates in Southwark and in areas such as Deptford and New Cross, and I'm not easily spooked but this is one estate that I hate visiting.

padington

Generali wrote: »

Depending on your requirements, you might be better off with a small flat, 7 days a week, in somewhere like Sevenoaks or Woking. You can get to the right part of the centre of London from those places faster than you can from zone 3.

Really? Wood green to kings cross is a few flicks of the metro, doubt Woking is any quicker.

padington

Thrugelmir wrote: »

High property prices in the UK will do nothing to help either.

Low interest rates will though. Hence my point.

lisyloo

Thanks all very much for the info on the area.

Oh and commuting from Croydon takes nowhere near 2.5hours

Sorry if I was unclear - my current place (Wiltshire) is 2.5 hours.
We don't see the value in uprooting to move somewhere that's 75 mins away.

you can be in Victoria in about 20 minutes on the fast trains

Brilliant if you work at Victoria but neither of us do.
Victoria -> angel is 30 minutes by tube and don't forget to add walk to Croydon station, wait for train, walk to Victoria tube, wait for tube and walk to office. So 5+5+20+5+5+30+5, so your 20 mins has just gone to 75 plus 2 season tickets, to live somewhere safe but otherwise completely uninspiring.

Thanks for the suggestion but it's just a different (less attractive) trade-off than central London. Yes it's safer and property prices are lower, but add in the 2 season tickets and the commute and it's a less attractive trade-off to my mind.

At the moment I think I'm not going to buy.
We're going to struggle to get a large mortgage simply because OH went self-employed 5 months ago, we would struggle to upkeep 2 properties and of course the job could all fall through (unlikely but we'd be stuck with a property we don't want).

However the bottom line is that
I don't want to pay 1/4 million for somewhere that's pants or 1/2 million for somewhere that's only half decent.
I have a lovely huge 5 bed detached in a lovely area to compare it with.

So - for those of you who are bullish, are we getting to the point where buyers will baulk at priecs and simply say no?
At least something for those of you who think prices will continue to rise to think about.

Generali

lisyloo wrote: »

I have to say that selling my 5-bed detached des res, moving away from all family, friends and hobbies to somewhere that sounds rather anonymous to buy a small flat doesn't appeal.

To clarify, I meant you might be better off with a 7-day-a-week let/purchase in a place that is further out in distance but not in time. You don't have to live in it 7 days a week!

For example, you can get a 1 bed place pretty near the station in 7oaks for £165k

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-44453449.html

Whereas a flat on a dodgy estate is inviting people to gazump the existing offer of £230k:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-43900477.html

£75k will buy a lot of season tickets and, depending where work is, you might find it quicker to get the train from there than the tube. I used to live in Wimbledon and my colleague coming in from Luton was in work before me.

Generali

lisyloo wrote: »

So - for those of you who are bullish, are we getting to the point where buyers will baulk at priecs and simply say no?
At least something for those of you who think prices will continue to rise to think about.

At some point, prices will be 'too high' and who knows, we might even have reached that point.

What history tells us is that being bullish on London house prices is usually the correct stance to take, no matter how mental it seems.

BillJones

lisyloo wrote: »

I know this is all about ME but leaving it all on the thread as I think there may be some general relevance i.e. the "can't buy anything half decent for less than half a million unless you don't mind living next door to a crack den" problem.

There's some middle ground, but at the price you were checking out, in zone 2, it's really going to be hard to find anything even "OK".

£500k makes it easy, £200k makes it close to impossible. Just over the river from where you were looking, a decent three bedroom flat in one of the nice developments will cost around £1.5m, and there's one only a few hundred metres from where you are looking, in Cinnabar Wharf (still in the East End), for £6.5m at the moment.