Why are property prices so different in the north?

Hectors_House

GreatApe wrote: »

Erm the reason is actually because very few people are willing to move to cheaper parts of the country

Its not all about work
Plenty of households do not work. Retired folk, those on benefits

But they wont sell their £500,000 property down south and buy a £200k property up north and bank the difference

It would not take many people to do this for prices to convert much closer than is today

I have said before, the only way to make London cheaper is to shrink the London social stock from ~24% towards ~10% by selling it off as they become vacant and limiting housing benefits

Move 500,000 social households out of London (~1.2 million people) into rUK over a period of a decade and you will find the differential between London and rUK falls

Likelihood of it happening .... 0%

What you say at the start of your post is actually happening in my village.

I’m East Anglia coastal. Persimmons are trying for the second time to get thru plans to build 725 houses on our boundary. They estimate 500 of these will be bought by folks selling up in London to retire to the coast.

In the space of the seven years I’ve lived here I’ve seen it change from a quiet village to yet another place where prices are rising fast and are out of the reach of locals.

There is very little work here so it’s becoming retirement central fast.

p00hsticks

ben501 wrote: »

Age could be clouding my memory, but I'm sure it wasn't like this further east (Yorkshire),

It's not your memory - if you're far enough north to get the 'look north' regional news, which covers both sides of the country, just check out the weather forecast and see how often rain is predicted for Cumbria on the west side of the country but not for Durham/ Northumberland/North Yorks on the East

Thrugelmir

zagubov wrote: »

Britain's too over-centralised around London;

Difficult now to reverse centuries of history and investment in infrastructure.

There's no sustained or consistent policy to relocate jobs outside London. In fact we used to encourage the reverse.

Why do you think that there's a high proportion of public sector jobs up north. Old school friend of mine worked in Croydon (first job). Within 9 months of joining was told office was relocating to Teeside. (Shipyards were in terminal decline by then). Choose to move elsewhere.

Another worked near Redhill in the private sector. Company relocated lock, stock and barrel to Crewe. As received funding to do so, as was some sort of Enterprise Zone. Being in a specialist area of employment. Decided to upsticks with his family.

The US computer companies are all in the Thames Valley as that's where the skills baseis . Likewise the City of London for legal and financial services. The Midlands for metal bashing. The issue arises when long established industries die, i.e. Northampton shoes, East Midlands coal mining etc.

westernpromise

Zero_Sum wrote: »

Cannot be?

London has a lot more in the way of leisure amenities that is true.
However when it comes to actually raising a family, the north wins by a mile.

So why doesn't anyone want to live there?

Not every expat who buys a property in France buys in Paris. They do, but they also buy places in the Dordogne and what have you. That's because they like living there.

Foreigners buying into the UK don't have family or other commitments so they could buy anywhere. Overwhelmingly, despite the cheap property, raht friendly people and warm rain, they don't buy in the north. Why would that be if it's such a great place to live?

I have suggested before that the reason northerners think the north is great is that they're unworldly and imagine the north is as good as life gets.

I think it was Les Dawson who used to tell a joke about Mancs going on a coach trip to London. In Oxford Street one says to another, Busy, intit? And the other Manc says Yeah, well there's a big coachload in from Manchester today.

International buyers have a different perspective. They've seen and probably lived in Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, Singapore: all international cities. Fly west from Dubai and there's no international city for 7,000 miles - except for London. Bradford or Middlesborough lag badly. In effect they actually aren't cheap enough.

westernpromise

zagubov wrote: »

Biggest problem is the lack of any good regional policy. Britain's arranged to suit employers, not those seeking employment. There's no sustained or consistent policy to relocate jobs outside London. In fact we used to encourage the reverse.

Britain's too over-centralised around London; most of the available cheap housing and spare workforce are in other urban areas. We've relied too much on people getting on their bikes to chase jobs but that can only be part of the answer; in fact it's turning into part of the problem.

I've posted links in the past about how London-headquartered parties have deliberately suppressed the growth of rival centres such as Birmingham. Policies like this need to stop, and the sooner the better. We need to spread work across the whole country.

That's an interesting read, but all it really says is that state central planning is a disaster and totally unequal to confronting challenges like the decline of metal bashing rustbelt industries. It's a damning indictment of typically socialist thinking. Rather than thinking about what could be done to assist backward dumps like Scotland and the north, successive socialist governments instead decided the answer was to hold back the Midlands so everyone ended up roughly equally badly off. The same thinking pollutes the left's attitude to schools, which is essentially that if one school is better than all the other you close it down.

Zero_Sum

westernpromise wrote: »

So why doesn't anyone want to live there?

Not every expat who buys a property in France buys in Paris. They do, but they also buy places in the Dordogne and what have you. That's because they like living there.

Foreigners buying into the UK don't have family or other commitments so they could buy anywhere. Overwhelmingly, despite the cheap property, raht friendly people and warm rain, they don't buy in the north. Why would that be if it's such a great place to live?

I have suggested before that the reason northerners think the north is great is that they're unworldly and imagine the north is as good as life gets.

I think it was Les Dawson who used to tell a joke about Mancs going on a coach trip to London. In Oxford Street one says to another, Busy, intit? And the other Manc says Yeah, well there's a big coachload in from Manchester today.

International buyers have a different perspective. They've seen and probably lived in Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, Singapore: all international cities. Fly west from Dubai and there's no international city for 7,000 miles - except for London. Bradford or Middlesborough lag badly. In effect they actually aren't cheap enough.

Lack of well paid jobs.
Theres also a lot of ignorance & snobbiness from southerners towards the north
But if you have a half decent job, your quality of life is just so much better

westernpromise

ben501 wrote: »

Depends where you're thinking of moving to. You mention the north west.
As a born & bred southerner who moved north years ago, my experience of the north west is WET.

I don't know how much of the north west has higher than average rainfall, but I often see a forecast of 'generally dry & sunny', only to look out of the window at rain.
Age could be clouding my memory, but I'm sure it wasn't like this further east (Yorkshire), and down south was much drier from what I remember.

A guy in our office from Manchester has observed that the weather is very appreciably warmer in London than back home.

westernpromise

Zero_Sum wrote: »

Lack of well paid jobs.
Theres also a lot of ignorance & snobbiness from southerners towards the north
But if you have a half decent job, your quality of life is just so much better

None of those are factors that would affect foreigners buying in. But overwhelmingly they don't buy in the north.

With all due respect there is a lot of ignorance from northerners towards southerners. A northerner insisting that the north has all heart could desire is a bit like a goldfish in a bowl arguing that the ocean's overrated because look at how great it is in this bowl.

kingstreet

westernpromise wrote: »

I have suggested before that the reason northerners think the north is great is that they're unworldly and imagine the north is as good as life gets.

What's the point...?

Yes, the North is full of ignorant oiks who know no better.

Zero_Sum

westernpromise wrote: »

None of those are factors that would affect foreigners buying in. But overwhelmingly they don't buy in the north.

With all due respect there is a lot of ignorance from northerners towards southerners. A northerner insisting that the north has all heart could desire is a bit like a goldfish in a bowl arguing that the ocean's overrated because look at how great it is in this bowl.

You proved my point in post above refering it to a backward dump.
Foreign investers will buy anywhere theyll think will make money. London is the capital & will always get too much investment at the expense of the rest of the country. Anyway what foreign investors do has nothing to do with my standard of living. If people choose to live in overpriced shoeboxes then thats up to them its not for me.