[title]
Ladder? What ladder? You’re looking at the ladder, mate: there it is, you can just see the first rung, dangling many many feet above your head. In a piece in the Evening Standard, it has been revealed that house prices in the capital are now at their highest EVER. Which means that, unless you already own your place (through some kind of inheritance and/or mistake) or have very generous parents, you are currently further away than ever from owning your own home in London.
The average asking price for a London home is now a staggering £677,110. Obviously, that figure is averaged across all the capital’s boroughs, so includes the upscale likes of Kensington & Chelsea (average asking price £1,736,077) and Westminster (£1,441,340). Okay, fine. But it also includes far less glamorous outliers such as Havering (£475,150) and Sutton (£540,305). What those four boroughs also have in common, though, is massive year-on-year growth in house prices: all of them have seen average prices increase more than 11 percent on 2021, with monthly rises in some cases of 3 percent.
According to experts, this return to a house price ‘boom’ (as an estate agent/seller might call it) in the capital following the drop-off during the pandemic is affected by a return to commuting and work life in the city and a trend for people wanting to upscale within London rather than feeling that they need to leave to get, say, a garden. It’s also fuelled by a real shortage of properties for sale in London right now. That scarcity has driven up prices and seen potential buyers outbidding each other for the few available ones.
Whatever, it’s not good news for London home-purchasers. Even those with pots of cash, it turns out, ironically.
Wallow in more darkness at Tate Britain’s show of painter Walter Sickert.