Everyone’s experience of buying property in London is different — if you can ever buy at all — but there are some commonalities around different price points, something which Emma Magnus has captured in this week’s feature on Londoners buying on different budgets.
The most familiar tale is scraping together enough for your first flat in whatever way you can, whether that’s using every bit of your savings, making use of a bewildering housing scheme or asking mummy and daddy for a hefty bit of deposit pocket money.
Here it’s a case of not caring where the place is, just having something, anything, to get you on the ladder.
Then there’s the settling down, family-minded move, where you have something of a career with some means to buy decently, and it’s all sussing out an area properly, the facilities, infrastructure, greenery and access to the sweet, sweet goods at Greggs. This is where I was fortunate to come in years ago, destined to cling on there forever more.
Ah, but then there are the people with actual wealth, who spend millions on houses and are able to find their dream home, or create it from the shell of someone else’s. This is what we all fantasise about.
But I think the truth is, every experience is stressful in its own way and comes with its compromises and disappointments as well as glories and sense of fulfilment.
Empathy for other people’s experiences is what we’re trying to achieve here — and aspiration. Isn’t that what London’s all about?
