This is the issue - the £350k I referred to earlier wasn't for a mansion, it was a two bed semi in reasonable condition around here. Now, that is nearer £600k (my neighbours sold for £650k earlier this year, although theirs was three bed (two plus a box room really)
I think you take your choice of where to live, sometimes you need to go down market, a two up two down victorian terrace was the usual first buy around here, probably still is, street parking and no front garden. If your lucky it might have double glazing.
Where is the biggest issue I think - hence our current thoughts for moving away (that and the fact that this area seems to get worse on an almost daily basis)
Mines an ex council house, built just after WW2, these kind of things bring the price down, the reason why people buy them and then spend money on them, reasonable sized gardens with parking for three cars if you pave over the front garden, street parking as well. Most of the houses built in the last 30 yrs have one parking space, very narrow clogged up cul de sac's no back garden, overlooked by neighbours and are 1.5 times the price. The council house mud, sticks, but for those that know they get a lot more for their money. Build quality is far better than anything they throw up today and it was built to last, if you can keep the mad developers out it will still be here when the 1990 stuff is hardcore.
You said that when you were earning 25k you needed 350k to buy a house. That would have been a mansion back then, surely? What year are you talking about?
When we bought our first house, in 1984 it cost £24k and we could only get a mortgage at twice my salary plus my wifes salary. Over the decades the multiplier has gone higher and higher, and is the root cause of hyper inflation in house prices. If banks and building societies had stuck with a much lower multiplier then house prices would have remained lower too. Banks and building societies didn't care if repayments became unmanageable. They could simply repossess the property, probably after the occupier had paid more than the original load, and sell it again and start the whole cycle again.
In 1985 my first place cost £18000 and that was a studio apartment a couple of years later I sold for £25000 and bought somewhere with a garden for about £30k next it was a £60k mortgage (3 times salary) c 1992 and a bigger garden then finally here £50k mortgage much bigger garden in 1997 paid £10k less than the original asking price due to the size of the garden meaning it had been on the market for over a year.
Not a mansion by any stretch - early 2000's. Bear in mind I am in SW London, so generally four times more than anywhere else in the country
OK, well according to https://www.ukhousingreview.org.uk/ukhr1011/updates/pdf/11-047ab.pdf the average house price in greater London was £351k in 2008 - after which there was a fall due to the financial crisis. If that was the average, presumably there were cheaper houses available, though admittedly nothing you could afford on £25k. I guess that's they created all the partial ownership schemes, where people end up paying rent and a mortgage and being responsible for all the maintenance costs too. And paying service charges that they have no control over, because these places are generally flats. Working people in London are pretty much screwed.
Around the area I was living and working (Twickenham, Whitton etc) there was very little below average. At that time, I'd have been happy with a do-er upper, but even those were too expensive (cheapest if I recall was £275k in Hanworth and it needed everything.. and I do mean everything from rewiring to new kitchen, bathroom, new roof and so on - and as it was in such condition, no lender would lend on it. By the time we moved to Lower Feltham, we looked at some really small new builds, but they were tiny (really tiny) to the point we didn't even ask for pricing. We moved in here in 2011, with our landlady buying it two weeks before we moved in, for £360k and that was cheap because the sellers wanted it gone fast due to them divorcing. At the point we moved here, my salary had reached the heady heights of £32k. Our rent is currently £1850, council tax £260, Water £50, other utilities £320(ish) - - doesn't leave much out of our income, so saving a yowking great deposit is absolutely a non-starter. As I say, our plan in the medium term, is to move away (most likely north) as I can now work quite a lot from home - I'd drive down when needed, overnight either in a Travel Lodge or at Mother in Law's house and travel back again (700 mile round trip). At current rates, I could quite easily knock £1100 a month off just between rent, council tax and water bills - - that, clears debt much faster and we'd only need a deposit of around £15-£20k to buy something in move in condition. At that rate, a 15-year mortgage would still be a lot less than I am paying in rent now.
I bought my first place, a studio flat, for £27,500. Unfortunately the service charge exploded (due partly to plans to convert a huge 1920s block from a centralised heating boiler to individual ones in each flat). I sold at a loss for £13,500. That really hurt, but then I got way luckier next time, with my 2 bed place nearly tripling in value in 6 yrs. The property market is a bit like a game of snakes and ladders. If you happen to land on ladders, you accumulate assets. One thing the gov could usefully do is sort out the downsizer market, given the number of over 65s. At the moment, the flats being built for that cohort and way too small and way too expensive, and the service charges make them almost unsaleable once the first owner dies, leaving relatives with a terrible headache. Plus the equity release system does not work well currently. It's a good idea on paper, but elderly people are being shafted by excessive charges and fees. That all needs regulating.
As you mentioned earlier, that is why things like shared ownership isn't the silver bullet that a lot of folks think it is - we signed up to be considered for some with Richmond Council many years ago, but they were all apartments (flats, to non-posh folks like me), not exactly cheap and by the time you took into account the mortgage, the rent on the other portion, the maintenance and then leaseholder fees, it worked out more per month than it would buying outright. I had friends that bought that way through Hounslow Council - they got a nice house in Bedfont to be fair, but they also got burnt with the costs continually rising to the point that it broke their marriage - by the time the divorce was done, they both walked away with absolutely nothing, despite years of payments, their deposit and property values going up. The government could - force banks to take into account rental payment history to see what folks can (and have been) affording to pay - encourage 100% mortgages that the government backs in some way, so maybe the government provides 25% of the value, the bank the rest and then payments are split accordingly. - build and accept that we need to build out, not up!
All the various "schemes" - shared ownership, equity release, etc - are designed to benefit lenders and financiers, not the consumer. It does not have to be that way. It would be perfectly possible to legislate so benefits and risks were shared equally between individual users and enabling companies. Dream on, eh?
Plus "Help to Buy" - another measure that only benefitted the house builders and continued to drive prices up.
We bought our first home, a one bedroom newly built flat, for £3300 in 1970. We had to sell the car to raise the deposit. We would loved to have bought a two bedroom flat in the same block but that was an extra £1000 and way out of our budget. There must have been a massive jump in inflation in late 1971/2 as we sold it for at least twice that, or more, after 9 months, and were able to buy a three bedroom terraced house - this time I had a job during a long college holiday, so we managed to get a much bigger mortgage, and took in student lodgers to help with the repayments when I went back to college. The amounts seem laughable now.
