london

Brockely's still on offer for about £400pcm. I lived their for two years and the rent didn't change, my ex hosuemates stayed in the property and still pay the same...

It depends entirely on your landlord - those who have owned their place for ages will typically be renting at a lower rate at £400pcm-ish is fairly achieveable. If they bought more recently then they're likely to be renting it at a stupidly insane rate - I saw £600pcm plus quoted for a shared house in Herne Hill recently.

Brixton and Hackney are basically the same thing - the most fashionable parts of their respective areas, for that alone they're going to be overpriced even by London standards.

Throw Peckham in there as well.

Herne Hill is pretty damn posh these days and has been for some time! It was out of my price range when I was last looking 10 years ago!

Can attest to insanity in Walthamstow, in our street flats that were going for low £200k are now going for £350k. We are basically stuck where we are as we're paying probably £300 a month below market rent, luckily our landlord likes us and has paid his mortgage off.

Kinda thinking London is not for the likes of me any more, if it ever was. The only people I knew who owned their place even last decade were people who had help from their parents. I was looking at SE London now even NE London is out of the question but tbh it's not really any cheaper.

£600 a month would have been expensive for a room in a shared house even for a gentrified bit of South London not that long ago, especially one that isn't on the Tube.

It's partly the Overground that's sent everything mental but not everywhere even has that excuse.

xp The cost of commuting in is crazy as well. It's fairly typical for my colleagues to be paying £5000 - £9000 a year in train fares, which isn't any more supportable in the long run.

There definitely needs to be more work done to encourage companies / jobs to relocate to other cities.

Friend who had v. small (350 sf) ex-council one-bed in Bloomsbury sold it for £360K last year, thinking he would relocate and wind up either mortgage-free or on a very low one, but seems to have just missed out on getting similar-but-larger flats near Caledonian Road. Judging by his experiences over the last year, once prices go past £250K and pass the stamp duty threshold, there's not much barrier to them going straight to £300K. His offers have been trumped by cash buyers on many, many occasions.

I can confirm rents in Herne Hill rents are as bonkers as ever. We moved out of our tiny one bed roomed garden flat near brockwell park (which the landlord is now advertising for £1100 a month) up the the road to West Norwood to a 2 bedroomed house for only slightly more. I think Tulse/West Norwood is on the turn too. There were more baby buggies than people in the railway at Tulse Hill station last sunday afternoon.

I was recently told by a resident that the Hither Green / Lee area hasn't been subject to the kind of madness which other bits of not-too-distant South East London have. I understand it's unremarkably alright around there but it's not an area I know well (or one I care to know well, particularly).

depends which part of hither green/lee. several 'conservation areas' round there, and the inevitable blackheath creep. closer you get to downham the cheaper i'd imagine

and 'unremarkably alright'? sir it is PARADISE

It's pretty nice around there, I know it well. Last time I was round there the big pub next to the station had gone gastro and a lot of the shops in the market area had turned decidedly pastel-shaded so I suspect it's on the turn.

Conversely the Old Tiger's Head is painted a weird shade of pink now and looks like an Eastenders wine bar from 1988 so god knows what's going on there.

lol @ the lord northbrook. went in there quite a bit when it were a propah boozah n the england footy was on

about 4x as many fancy restaurants as a decade ago, yeah, blackheath is comin'. so flee south, south to where the rents are yet cheap, where baring road sheers off toward grove park, where bromley looms

It's cheap round there because it's shit. I mean there is literally nothing of interest.

Last time I was round there all the pubs had been demolished and replaced with big ugly furniture outlets, it made me nostalgic even for the roughest of them.

Are these prices going to fall back down again once Help to Buy stops, then? Or have they just permanently moved prices out of yet more people's reach?

Hopefully the end of HTB will mean some of the mad overheating stops but I don't get the expression we'll see prices actually fall anytime soon - it seems to take really bad conditions for prices to actually fall, I'm afraid. Most people seem to refuse to sell in a falling market unless they have to.

If interest rates shoot up, now that might be different.

NB I really don't know what I'm on about.

I do not think HTB has had a major impact yet. Interest rates rising could cool things but BTL rents could go up.

Was thinking interest rates rising could lead to a lot of repossessions? One thing holding me back from trying to get on HTB is that we could barely get a mortgage to cover a 2 bed flat somewhere out of the way around Waltham Forest as it is and that's with relatively low rates, if they go up I'd be stuck with huge mortgage repayments on some shithole. There must be a lot of people who are stretching themselves beyond their means?

That's a real concern when I see friends on new teachers' salaries looking to get a 95% LTV mortgage on a 250k flat. People seem to be judging repayments against what they're overpaying in rent now without really thinking about what happens if the rates go up. The challenge at a national level is that outside of a few pockets houses are not overpriced really and increasing rates to cool London could crash everywhere else.

outside of a few pockets houses are not overpriced really

Is this right? I heard the opposite when I went home for Xmas, unless Worcester is one of the pockets.

Was thinking interest rates rising could lead to a lot of repossessions?

Not necessarily. I mean, obviously if rates go up a lot it will lead to an increase in repossessions, but I think a relatively modest increase wouldn't lead to catastrophe. Firstly, a lot of people will have fixed rate mortgages. Secondly, people on variable mortgages who got them before the crash are paying considerably less now than they were pre-crash, so (assuming they still have the same income) they can afford for their mortgages to go back up again. Thirdly, people who bought even a fairly short time ago (e.g. a year) have probably seen the value of their property go up by 10% or more - if they became unable to pay their mortgage they could sell their property for a profit and move somewhere cheaper. Repossessions only really kick when people can't sell their property (usually because they're in negative equity).

xp Might be. West / South-west tends to be a bit more expensive, i think. Central England and the North is mostly a way off the peak of a few years ago. You can get a nice three-bed family home in Birmingham for about the same as a pokey studio on the fringes of London.

hell of a commute, though

fwiw Worcester is in Central England, albeit the south west part of it.

My sense of geography is awful, tbh.

Xp, my boss commutes from Coventry atm

currently searching for a flat to rent with my brother. demoralising. sometimes it feels like something could extend indefinitely and to so little reward that it could easily become a permanent activity or enforced recreation. going around looking at expensive small places you don't want to live in, and decoding estate agents' kaleidoscopes of lies.

This is starting to sound like a dystopian novel of the near future. Instead of "The Trial" it shall be "The Flat Hunt".

Yes, a part-furnished labyrinth of chambers in unheard of places, gumtree breadcrumbs, circus mirror photos - one small bedroom, one large bedroom, one small bedroom, one large bedroom. Might suit those with a yen for folly and traipsing around on rainy evenings. also, because everything is available NOW and is snapped up IMMEDIATELY, unless you are lucky you or have the spare cash to overlap two rents at once, you have to hand in your notice on your previous place before you've found somewhere you're moving into. So there's a wonderful jump into the void and a period of suspended nausea.

Oh! Email from brother:

'But no bedroom photos on one of them'

and another!

'Holloway property looks shit.'

Well, that's all sorted then.

you're welcome to look at my flat. I've got to go and live with my bride-to-be sooner or later.

Christ, thanks, woof. Certainly will include that in our currently ineffectual investigations. will be in touch.

isn't that down SE way?

yes - in Camberwell - going to Hither Green to be nearer my beloved/my beloved a205.

Congrats woof!

Having this thread in mind I looked at proposals for 'evil' crossrail and I am guessing areas that have not been exploited enough yet...the abbey wood/erith/belvedere 'triangle' does look ripe enough.

Also looks as if North Kent might join London, which makes a corner of my heart grey and sad.

Yay, Woof!

(But also yay to the idea of Fizzles moving to Sarf London for purely selfish reasons of ease of inflicting pints and book exchanges upon him.)

lol 'inflicting' pints and books. how will i cope. but yes, regardless of the ins and outs of arranging the move, sarf london is clearly where it's at. brother currently lives in Herne Hill, which is expensive, and apart from Brockwell Park, is a bit nothingy (prepared to listen to Herne Hill defenders if you're around). Oh, and it has 'Herne' there.

I am an endless defender of Herne Hill! The park! Herne the Hunter! The weekend market on the pedestrianised street outside the charming Victorian rail station! The fantastic little bookshop on the lane! Shoegaze gigs at the Half Moon (though I'm not sure that they have those much any more.) There's also lots and lots of really beautiful Victorian architecture around those parts - the Historical Society does walking tours which I highly recommend.

If it were not so expensive, I would live there, rather than here. Alas, it *is* very expensive (and all for a blip of a zone change).

nothingy status: rescinded. (i've never been in that bookshop, which is certainly an oversight.)

Truefact: The current book hostage you are holding comes from that very bookshop!

(I should probably attempt to get it back from you before you move and it disappears into boxed-up limbo, eh.)

i'm p good with keeping that sort of thing separate (i have a 'not my books don't take to indian restaurant' pile). i have finished it tho, so happy to do mid-frozen cold war forest hostage swap at any point.

herne hill is quite nice if I ever want to live in south london probably there. no tube though, obv.

Yes, the bookshop in Herne Hill is nice, and there is also an excellent oxfam bookshop on half moon lane. The half moon pub isn't going to open until the summer after the big flood. The Florence now has a creche. West Norwood FTW.

herne hill has a very lazy feel that i like, especially so close to the nonstop insanity of brixton

but yeah, it's been gentrified long before brixton went down that road, no?

yeah, no? no, yeah?

I found Herne Hill increasingly unbearably smug towards the end of living there, although this was probably due to the best pub, the Half moon, being closed for last 6 months, with the alternatives not being much cop and full of 4 years olds running around. Living within cycling distance of Brockwell Park has proved to be a good compromise personally, and I now live in a place twice the size of the old one. Also better connected now in comparison, although it's all buses and trains (as opposed to the Brixton tube).

I think the gentrification is a recent thing. My girlfriend thinks it's been within the last 5 years, and remembers her football team being thrown out of The Regent (for dancing on tables!) when it was an old spit and sawdust irish pub, and squats along Railton Road. Rent prices have certainly skyrocketed in the the 2 and a half years we were there.

My brother moved to Herne Hill in the mid-80s (he was a student and managed to get short life housing in one of the big houses up on Herne Hill itself, his room cost a princely £6 per week!) and the impression I have is that over that period HH started more (lower-)middle class than Brixton but the gentrification which has happened to HH has been Brixton led.

Quite how I've managed to pick up that impression I'm not sure; HH, as far as I can tell, never went through an edgy hipster phase, and I think Brixton's edgy hipster phase* surely started before Herne Hill had changed very much - I always thought it managed to appeal to people who liked the edgy-hipster element of Brixton but didn't necessarily want to live in the middle of it.

*think we still called them trustafarians in those days; I guess they were a bit different but probably performed the same shock-troops-of-gentrification purpose