Houseprices are falling annually for the first time since 2012 — and many forecasters expect they will fall further still. It’s the news private renters like me think we’ve been waiting for. Brush up your credit rating and cash in your ISAs, the keys to a natty starter flat in Zone 2 are practically in your pocket already. Right? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Read beyond the headlines (always encouraged) and you’ll pretty quickly butt up against the inconvenient figure of £536,622. That’s the average price London homes have “fallen” to in a year, according to Halifax.
Realistically, you would want to have at least a 15 per cent deposit to put down — that’s just over £80,000 you’ll need in your savings account — plus fees and a bit of stamp duty to pay (London first-time buyers are exempt up to £425,000).
Not only that but you’ll need an income of £101,360, assuming you can borrow at four-and-a-half times your salary. Another consequence of falling house prices is that mortgages tend to get more expensive and harder to come by. The past week and its “mortgage mayhem” (a phrase which hides a lot of painful belt-tightening) have shown this very clearly.
A well-off couple might be able to afford all that. The majority of singletons will not. In Homes & Property we recently gathered the data on what you must earn to buy solo in each London borough. The results were not encouraging. Even in the cheapest borough, Barking & Dagenham, the salary needed to secure an 85 per cent mortgage is almost double the London average.
No surprise then that almost two-thirds of first-time buyers are buying jointly, compared with just 43 per cent in 2014. If you’re single and renting, it seems, you’re probably better off investing in your love life this summer than a deposit.
Obviously this is not the time to stop squirrelling away any cash that’s survived the cost-of-living crisis plus singleton tax equation. But if you really are serious about buying a home in London, my sums suggest this: it will be faster for you to find true love (with another average earner, ideally) than it will to save enough to buy alone.
In other words, don’t try to get a mortgage now. Get a boyfriend, get a girlfriend, then get a mortgage.
Hand on heart, though, I can’t seriously advise shacking up prematurely for the sake of a slightly more affordable mortgage. If you do become happily partnered and end up living in romantic bliss where split bills are a happy bonus, then all to the good. But there is little misery to compare to that of being economically trapped in a bad — or worse, dangerous — relationship.
In fact, why must we make a co-buying arrangement romantic at all? A trusted friend or a sibling is probably a more reliable buying partner than a whirlwind summer lover, and you don’t have to sacrifice sexy for sensible before you are ready. It’s a lesson many established couples could learn too.
In other news...
Caroline Lucas announced today that she will stand down as the Green MP for Brighton & Hove after 13 years in office. In a letter to her constituents she explains that the competing pressures of MP work have not allowed her to focus on fighting the climate crisis as directly as she thinks necessary.
The eerie fug of toxic wildfire smoke currently shrouding New York City is a striking illustration of her argument that governments are acting far too slowly in the face of accelerating environmental catastrophes.
Lucas has done brilliant work as an MP and has made the Green agenda mainstream in Parliament. It is shocking that there remains so much resistance within government to the clear urgency of climate threat that she now feels the best avenue for her to tackle it is from the outside.
