'Beverley house prices have risen by £100,000 since I moved here. But I'm not laughing'
04-22-2014
By Hull Daily Mail
Neil Pickford says Beverley's house price boom is a false economy for most people
Neil Pickford bemoans the widening gap between house prices and wages.
I know it’s not an original thought, but isn’t it ridiculous how expensive houses are these days?
I remember when I first started looking at moving into the HU area, back at the end of the last century. I used one of those new-fangled internet price-comparison thingies to check on prices and was astonished.
Originally I focused on Hull as being very similar to my old address in Bristol: a medium-sized city with waterfront and old docks which were slowly being converted to post-industrial use, and an attractive and historic centre. As far as location was concerned, both cities were stuck on the edge of civilisation (in Bristol’s case, the last stop before Wales) and had interesting countryside nearby.
To make the place even more welcoming you’d even copied the Severn Bridge to make me feel at home.
And so, with no prejudices to get in the way, I started to search for a suitable home for me and my family - somewhere close to both the city centre and a reasonable school would be perfect.
To my astonishment the website showed me page after page of properties priced at under £10,000. In fact I had to flick through more than three quarters of the listings before I got above that magic figure.
I couldn’t believe my eyes: at the time I was selling a two-bedroomed ground floor flat in central Bristol and, for the same price as I was asking (and getting) I could buy half a street. I could have one house for a bedroom, another for a sitting room, somewhere else for the kids and a completely different address for my model railway.
Obviously things didn’t work out that way: due to circumstances outside my control I ended up having to find somewhere else very quickly and we ended up in Beverley – where we’ve been happy ever since.
Even here, in the jewel of East Yorkshire, it was still dirt-cheap to buy in 2000. The first house we rented was offered with an option to buy at less than £50,000.
Since those happy and not so far-off days the price of almost every single property in the town has shot up by at least £100,000, and it’s ridiculous.
Have wages increased by 300 per cent over 10 years? I know mine haven’t.
Earlier this year estate agents nationally were crowing that house prices had returned to the levels we saw just before the big crash of 2008 – as if that was a good thing. Now we hear they are powering ahead at record rates around London, and you can bet your bottom dollar that what’s happening down there will eventually make its way up here.
It’s buy-to-let that’s doing it: those who have got money are making the entirely sensible decision to stick their savings into bricks and mortar rather than the banks because, frankly, if you leave your money in a bank that pays you doodle-spit then you’re an idiot.
Far better to have something you can touch and bang your head on, that also brings in an income. Something that – history tells us - will also probably grow in value and act as a nice little nest egg for retirement. It’s a no-brainer, for those who can afford it.
And this pushes up the prices, making it even harder for those with no money to buy their first house, which means they have to rent somewhere, which increases demand, which pushes up rents….. and so on and so on.
And the higher the rents, the less chance of saving towards that all-important first-time deposit. Couple that with the amount of debt that my boys will already have to pay off if they go to university, and you can soon see that the figures are stacked against them.
The only time they’ll be debt-free is when their beloved parents die (a moment they obviously want to delay for as long as possible) and leave them our billion pound house in ever-popular Beverley.
They might then be able to club together and buy a small terraced house in Hull on the proceeds.
Neil Pickford: by day a mild-mannered virger: by night…he walks the streets and tries to make sense of it all.
You can read more of Neil's various meanderings at his website ThePickfordPapers pickfordpapers.wordpress.com/