23, back from travelling, and can't afford a house in London

GreatApe

Filo25 wrote: »

I can't say I blame him, if I was just starting out on my career I wouldn't be moving to London unless either the increased salary compensated for the increased costs, or the development /career prospects from the London role were better (the second point is probably more important that the first earlier in your career anyway).

Sure but if you hit it big some way you dont dream of a 3 bedroom terrace in stoke you go and buy the £10 million apartment within walking distance of Hyde park

Like it or not a lot of people like to show off their wealth. This is true for the poor as well as the rich. Look at the number of minimum wage workers with iphones. London especially the 5-10 most expensive boroughs are the iphones of housing. Sure maybe the homes are no better maybe the area is no better but people are paying the premium to be around other wealthy people and the status. In the same way a Chinese $100 smartphone is more or less the same gadget as the $1'000 iPhone yet there is a market for the $1,000 iphone. Not understanding why London homes cost 5 x as much is similar to not understanding how apple iphones cost 5x as much as generic smartphones

A third of world income is capital and capital likes to be near other capital. This results in the big central cities booming in price over the last 25 years. London New-York Frankfort Paris Hong-Kong Singapore Shanghai Beijing

GreatApe

London is very rare and what happened to its population and housing stock is very rare it may even be the only case of a capital city experiencing huge population decline over such a long period of time.

During 1930-1990 London population fell by 1.2 million while in those 60 years lots and lots of new homes were built. This of course resulted in cheap housing after all if you keep building for 60 years and lose a million residents housing is going to be cheap. The problem is most housing bears and media types dont accept or know that 1990s London was an odd a rare situation and seem to think 1990s prices were a normal when they were very abnormal

by comparison pairs population went up by 3.6 million during the same time London had lost 1.2 million people.

So I would say prices now in London represent fair value prices 20 years ago were far too cheap for a capital city

Malthusian

GreatApe wrote: »

Sure but if you hit it big some way you dont dream of a 3 bedroom terrace in stoke you go and buy the £10 million apartment within walking distance of Hyde park

Yuck. If I was from Stoke I'd rather have a ~£10 million manor house in Cheshire with a bit left over for a pad in Manchester for the city living side. What's the point in spending £10 million to live in the same size property I had before, near people who are just as rich as me, in a more expensive area? I gain nothing as my surroundings haven't changed. And there's no pleasure to be gained from "status" as status is relative, and I'll be comparing myself against my neighbours who also own £10 million flats near Hyde Park, and feeling jealous of the billionaire oligarchs over the road.

Herzlos

You'd also be thinking pretty small. £10m could buy you a genuine castle in various parts of Europe. Or a reasonable sized country estate and a handful of apartments across various cities.

LydiaJ

GreatApe wrote: »

You are both right

Sure plenty of people have no desire to live in London that is obvious

But it is also right in that people who do have money want to live in expensive places and for the UK that means London and particular 5 or so boroughs

It doesn't take an Oxford physics grad to work out that if you make millions you don't dream of buying a two up two down in Stoke on Trent. If you hit the euromillions you don't buy your mother a terrace in Doncaster. If you are a CEO of a big company you don't have a second home in Middlesborough

What all this means is while Stoke on Trent is likely priced on income, London and especially the most expensive 5-10 London borough prices are set on capital not income. And people with capital often only desire being around other capital and the capital of capital is London

Of course. Nobody is denying that there are some truly grotty parts of this country where it's hard to imagine anybody choosing to live if they could afford to move elsewhere. It's just inaccurate to characterise the whole of the country as like that apart from London.

SingleSue wrote: »

Eldest son initially concentrated his grad applications to the London area and just outside as he had got used to just jumping on a train and within 30 minutes being in the city at university. He then, after seeing how much rent would be, switched to applying for a grad role 12 miles from his home town where he is being paid a smaller but not by much salary but with vastly decreased housing costs for a much bigger property (sharing a two bed house with a friend instead of renting just a room) and that is with paying a premium for being centre instead of in the outskirts.

The savings in accommodation costs means he still visits and enjoys London on a regular basis (Liverpool Street in one hour from his new 'digs') and still has money to spare.

Doesn't surprise me that a son of yours knows how to make his money go a long way.

GreatApe wrote: »

Sure but if you hit it big some way you dont dream of a 3 bedroom terrace in stoke you go and buy the £10 million apartment within walking distance of Hyde park...

Not understanding why London homes cost 5 x as much is similar to not understanding how apple iphones cost 5x as much as generic smartphones.

I don't think anybody on this thread doesn't understand why London homes are so expensive. More people want to live in the capital than can be conveniently fitted into its current housing stock. We all get it that lots of people do, in fact, want to live in London. If any of us say we don't understand why people want to, that doesn't mean we don't understand that they do. It's like when I say I don't understand why people want to spend an evening out in a place where the music volume leaves your ears still ringing when you get up for work the following morning, and you can't hear a word that anybody says to you. I mean it's completely alien to my idea of what's fun, but I'm well aware that many people enjoy it and that's why there's a market for it.

We just disagree with westernpromise's assertion that absolutely everybody wants to live in London unless they are deluding themselves that anywhere else could possibly be as good, and also with his equally blinkered belief that the price of a property is directly correlated with the quality of life that can be had by living in it, regardless of the circumstances or preferences of the hypothetical person who might live there.

Malthusian wrote: »

Yuck. If I was from Stoke I'd rather have a ~£10 million manor house in Cheshire with a bit left over for a pad in Manchester for the city living side.

Indeed. I can think of all sorts of things I could do with £10m. Buying a flat near Hyde Park wouldn't get onto my list at all.

Malthusian

Herzlos wrote: »

You'd also be thinking pretty small. £10m could buy you a genuine castle in various parts of Europe. Or a reasonable sized country estate and a handful of apartments across various cities.

Agree entirely.

I remember reading somewhere that you can't call yourself rich until you own at least four properties for your own use (i.e. not buy-to-let): townhouse, country estate, ski chalet and villa on a remote island paradise, amongst which you can then flit about with the changing seasons as they do in Trollope and Austen novels. £10 million should easily stretch to that.

So the kid from Stoke who makes it good and then fulfills his dream of spunking his entire £10 million on a flat opposite Hyde Park has not only wasted his money to achieve nothing, but made himself look silly among his new neighbours.

GreatApe

Malthusian wrote: »

Yuck. If I was from Stoke I'd rather have a ~£10 million manor house in Cheshire with a bit left over for a pad in Manchester for the city living side. What's the point in spending £10 million to live in the same size property I had before, near people who are just as rich as me, in a more expensive area? I gain nothing as my surroundings haven't changed. And there's no pleasure to be gained from "status" as status is relative, and I'll be comparing myself against my neighbours who also own £10 million flats near Hyde Park, and feeling jealous of the billionaire oligarchs over the road.

The proper rich dont get proper rich saying I have enough why compare myself to others. It is a competitive nature that does not go away no matter how much they have after a certain point its all about status and power not about money although you need money to buy some status like the big expensive London house.

GreatApe

Herzlos wrote: »

You'd also be thinking pretty small. £10m could buy you a genuine castle in various parts of Europe. Or a reasonable sized country estate and a handful of apartments across various cities.

That is probably what lotto winners and the less ambitious kids of rich parents would think and do

For self made people anything past £10 million is power and status (no sane person could spend £10 million in a lifetime) and this should not be seen as a bad thing. They buy silly priced things as a way to continue doing what they are doing. Just seeing their stock or cash holdings increase isnt enough. They are the ones that buy the £1 million painting. The £10 million boat. The £50 million London apartment. And of course the richest of the rich seem to end it all by giving most of it away

kinger101

Cakeguts wrote: »

A friend of mine who lives in a non EU country has told me this week that the UK universities that can't attract enough UK students are sending agents to poorer countries to attract students to study in the UK and they then charge them international fees.

Universities are businesses. A student paying £25,000 pa in fees is much more welcome than one paying £9,300. They'll always find places for international students. They'll design courses specifically for them.

qwert_yuiop

LydiaJ wrote: »

:rotfl:
There are just under 9 million people squeezed into nearly 16 sq km of London.

The other 57 million people in the UK have more than 240 sq km to spread out over. .

You really need to check those figures.