Buying outside of London

chartom123

Hi,

Hopefully this is the right place to post this. Just need some advice about getting on the property ladder.

I am 27, married with a 17 month old and we live with my parents (not ideal, I know!) We live in London so it is virtually impossible to buy a place around here. Even to rent will cost about £1000 a month without bills, and we don't want to get into renting anyway as we want a place of our own.

So we have thought about it for a long time and we want to move outside of London. Even after speaking to local housing associations about our options, they even told us to move away! In areas like Warwickshire you can get a 3 bedroom house with help to buy for around £180000! You literally couldn't buy a shed for that here.

I just really don't know how to go about it. We don't have the deposit saved yet, will probably be saved by the end of 2017, but I would like to have a plan of action. The places we are looking at are around a 1.5hrs drive away, so we are going to need new jobs in the area ideally. But then will we be unlikely to get a mortgage if we have new jobs?? Or should we stay in our current very stable jobs and commute until we find somewhere in the new area? Or we could move to the area for a bit then look to buy, but I don't want to set up a new life somewhere only to not have any help to buy properties come up in that area or be declined a mortgage for any reason! Then we will be really stuck!

Does anyone have any experience with buying in a new area or any advice you can offer please? Sorry for the long waffling post

Doozergirl

The thing about many places in the midlands is that it's easy to commute. London is another beast entirely. It could take me an hour and half to travel 7 miles on some days.

I can do 15 miles in half an hour here. Living near a motorway also makes life really easy.

When we moved from London, my husband commuted for a while working with a couple of overnight stays and then we made the jump.

We spent every weekend driving around places looking fornthe roght place to live. When we got our mortgage etc it was based on his job here and mine in London. They had no care once we'd moved.

I walked out of one job, decided to take a month off after moving and walked straight into another job.

It's not so hard. In fact, it was a great move.

seven-day-weekend

The Midlands is very accessible for most places in England and Wales. A good place to job hunt from!

steampowered

If you intend to move to the Midlands, wouldn't it be sensible to rent for a year first?

So that you can get settled into new jobs, get to know the area and decide where you want to live?

Out,_Vile_Jelly

If you're living with parents for free (or nearly free) you should have been able to save something for a deposit by now. You'll need to look at your budgeting if you want a mortgage.

Friends of mine bought in Northamptonshire "because it's cheap". They both ended up spending so much time commuting they sold and went back to renting nearer their jobs and families.

always_sunny

Do you need a 3 bedroom house? If you're FTB with one child you could get something cheaper and closer?

The date is so far away (Deposit by end of 2017?) and so vague (do you work today, will you work tomorrow, etc) that makes planning almost impossible!

Grenage

Assuming you've saved some money for a deposit, it's not a bad idea to rent for 6 months in an area - before you buy. Then when you do apply for a mortgage, you'll hopefully have had a full-time job for a while.

ibizafan_2

There are a lot of Londoners moving up to Rugby, as the train to Euston takes 50 minutes or less. Even with the price of the rail ticket, it can make sense financially.

Malmo

+1 for those who have recommended / suggested renting first. It's a good idea to trial a completely new location before you make a significant financial and lifestyle commitment from which it might be hard to detach yourself.

Much of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire & Buckinghamshire is experiencing double digit price growth and even modest properties are getting further and further out of reach for some people.

Warwickshire & Northamptonshire might be possible choices to scope out. Northampton isn't the nicest town, having lived there for a number of years, but it is well connected to London and Birmingham by road and rail and a 2-bed terrace in a decent area should be around the £160 - 170K mark. Rugby is also another possible option with good travel connections. However, you'll need to trade off the cost & time of commuting against lower housing costs (versus London).

walwyn1978

steampowered wrote: »

If you intend to move to the Midlands, wouldn't it be sensible to rent for a year first?

So that you can get settled into new jobs, get to know the area and decide where you want to live?

This. It also means you can look properly, do your research, find a nursery for the little one if that's what you're looking for that you like and not feel bounced into a quick house purchase because your jobs start soon etc etc.

We relocated from London back to Yorkshire and rented. It allowed us to suss out the market more, find villages we wouldn't have known existed before and consider whether we could live there properly, etc.

If you're worried about having lots of stuff and not fitting it into a rental house, consider either renting a house with a garage and storing it in there, or check out self storage container units.

Good luck with it all.

westernpromise

In terms of putting a bit of structure on it, consider how far away you're prepared to move to, given that you will have grandparents who want to see the little 'un and whom you may want to have handy for baby sitting etc. Then look at what you actual commute would a/ take and b/ cost, based on that.

In both cases this not just the train journey into the mainline but the actual door to door trip. One hears a lot of "it's only 15 minutes to London Bridge" from people who live in Nunhead, but you're not at work yet and in fact London Bridge is still in South London.

So let's say you're prepared to move to Banbury. That's an hour's train journey into Marylebone, so if you worked in the West End, you're looking at 1.5 hours each way meaning you leave the house at 7.15 for a 9am start. Or you head for the train after dropping off junior around that time. You'll be getting home at 7.30 or so too so that's a long day for junior at the nursery.

The necessary season tickets for that route will cost you about £6,000 a year. That's a cost equivalent to the repayments on a £100,000 mortgage. If you have a partner doing the same trip too, then that's a cost equivalent to a £200,000 mortgage. OK, incrementally it's not; you're paying for a bit of a commute now. But you see the point. Unless you can buy a suitable house £150 - £200k cheaper in Banbury than in London, it works out costlier to live there, especially as the commute cost goes up every year whereas the mortgage can be fixed for years. You also don't get commuting costs back when you sell your house.

OK, Banbury's still in the south and thus still quite pricey. But I'd recommend doing the same analysis for wherever. Stafford is twice as far away, houses are half the price of Banbury, and the season ticket only costs about £1,000 more. Of course that is now decidedly in the Midlands, a 3-hour drive away, and you aren't going to be seeing as much of the parents up there, plus you'll be commuting for 5 hours a day.

The other alternative as outlined by others is that you work locally to save the cost and time of the commute. The downside to that is that the local house prices in most areas tell you much about what the local wages are going to be like. You could indeed look at commuting the other way, so you move to somewhere like Warwick or Henley-in-Arden and go to Birmingham. Henley-in-Arden is a cheap commute but the house prices are similar to Banbury.

London is an international city, fortunately or unfortunately as you happen to see it, and property prices reflect this. Geneva, Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, New York: all expensive cities. There is something to be said for grabbing as much of the money as you can while it's passing through, especially as things like employer's pension inputs are also going to be worth more, and doing the relocate to somewhere cheaper a bit later in life.

Or that is how I would think about it.