London house prices have risen by 18% in the last year according to an article in the Guardian newspaper. This is starting to raise concerns about whether we will see another crash in the market.
The continuing rise in house prices in the capital mean that it is becoming more and more expensive to live there and the comparative pricing of homes when compared to the rest of the UK is widening. This means that anyone wanting to move to London from elsewhere in the country may be in for a nasty shock!
It’s definitely a seller’s market in London at the moment with homes being sold quickly and is the majority of cases vendors are achieving the asking price if not more. This trend isn’t being seen across the whole of the UK. There are hotspots such as Manchester, but for many areas prices are still below the peak values that we saw in 2007 before the last housing market crash.
So what do you do if you are looking to buy in London? Well there are some options for you; if you are a first time buyer then the Government has a scheme called help to buy which makes getting onto the property ladder achievable for some people that simply couldn’t afford to before.
Another option is to live outside of London in a town with good transport links into the City, you get more property for your money but you would need to weight this up against commuting costs and the time you would spend travelling each day.
You could live as an extended family and buy a home together with your parents, this may seem like a drastic choice but for some people desperate to get on that property ladder it could be a viable option.
Let’s just hope that we don’t see a repeat of the 2008 crash and that people aren’t stretching themselves to the limit in their borrowing, we’ve seen evidence that the banks are more cautious about mortgage lending than they were. But we have also seen this cyclical hike in prices followed by a crash before so I guess only time will tell.