Is the UK housing market in an extreme bubble or am I being unreasonable?

Is the UK housing market in an extreme bubble or am I being unreasonable?

This is the town where I live: rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?searchType=RENT&locationIdentifier=REGION^491&insId=2&radius=0.0&minPrice=&maxPrice=&minBedrooms=&maxBedrooms=&displayPropertyType=&maxDaysSinceAdded=&sortByPriceDescending=&_includeLetAgreed=on&primaryDisplayPropertyType=&secondaryDisplayPropertyType=&oldDisplayPropertyType=&oldPrimaryDisplayPropertyType=&letType=&letFurnishType=&houseFlatShare=false

It's not a particularly fancy place; just a decent suburban area.

And yet look at the rents. They're through the roof.

The median household income in the UK (net of taxes) is about £28,000.

In my area, it's probably more like £35,000 - a little higher, but not 'high' - I don't understand how people can really be paying these prices and still have money left over for anything else.

A McMansion for £5,500 per month? That's $7,283.

Give me a break.

And god forbid you actually want to buy anything.

This is $737,000.

This is $873.50 per square foot.

That's ludicrous, isn't it?

Not when your country is full of Achmeds

Birmingham and London are a different country altogether my friend

Too much moslems

You live on a tiny island and have a strong economy shop around in different areas, you probably have something driving pruces up, any big companies, or are you near the water?

Dont you read the newspaper son?
Bad debt is all over european housing markets, italy alone has 20%

The tidbit I've seen about household finances in the UK leads me to believe that you people have really, really fucked ratios between income and expenses.

A house like in the OP would fetch... Maybe $2,000 or $2,500 a month near me. Something like that shitheap garbage dump in your second post would be at most, $80,000.

Real estate in the UK is about as pants-on-head retarded as that in Los Angeles or San Francisco. It's just fucking retarded.

But to answer your question OP: yes it's in a bubble. Everything's been propped up in the western world over the last few years and it's not gonna last forever. My guess for a major downturn is within the next year or two.

>terraced house
>call it a cottage and triple the price

lmao, I thought it was San Francisco for a moment.

The median salary in the City of London, which boasts about 400,000 workers is £48,000.

When you consider that a lot of households these days have two working adults, it is not at all difficult to envisage that the prices being paid are actually fair.

Your example of Esher in Surrey has a direct rail link and it only takes 30 minutes to central london. That makes it very desirable, and so you can assume that the people who are living there are above that average wage significantly.

So no, it isn't a bubble. It's just people have unrealistic expectations as to how affordable housing should be now that we have a housing supply that expects each house to have two people working per dwelling.

I'm sure some developer will figure it out and start creating microflats for perma-single internet men, but I think some of the building regulations will have to change first, and we'll need driverless cars because we cannot achieve the density required for this due to the amount of parking demand that it would create.

So the fact that an 844 square foot house 30 minutes away from the City of London can be afforded (just about) by a pair of corporate lawyers, junior bankers, big four accountants and auditors and the like tells you that there *isn't* a bubble?

This is *not* a good house. It's something our lower class lived in 10 or 15 years ago. Not our lower-middle class - our lower class.

And now the only people who can afford it are City workers, but there's no bubble?

gentrification

If its near high paying jobs, lower tier plebs are gunna gtfo.

Does that include television license?

It's not particularly 'near' high-paying jobs. I would be more amenable to the gentrification argument if we were talking about loft conversions in Hoxton or Shoreditch, or houses in Brixton - but this is nowhere near inner London. It's barely within the M25.

This is regular commuter-belt territory. It's not Wentworth or St George's Hill; it's just a normal, decent town in the south east of England.

Not a lot of gentrification going on - it's just that prices are rising at an astonishing rate.

I'm assuming you're joking m8, but on the off chance that you're not, it almost certainly doesn't. Nor does it include council tax or utility bills.

How much is the television license there? I don't even understand how that works.

Toilet off kitchen? downunder there has to be two doors between a toilet and food preparation.

But yeah, it is the same in NZ, prices started rising 10 years ago and have never stopped. Too many people moving here, too few houses.

This is honestly the sort of housing that used to be occupied by the poor.

Now you'd have to have a joint income of something like £90,000 just to get a mortgage for a place like that - assuming you could scrape together a 20% deposit and get a 5x joint income loan.

That's something like the 90th percentile of household incomes - these aren't rich people living in these houses, but they're much better off than the average person in the UK in terms of their income. Of course, factoring in the insane house prices, they're not much better off at all.

It's like £150 per year famalam.

More or less everyone in the country knows it's ridiculous and we expect that it will be abolished in the next 5 years or so. It seems so anachronistic and weird now that it probably won't be around much longer.