Sad: Rightmove shows increasing number of B&Bs, Bunkhouses etc up for sale

Cantclimbtom

Well-known member
Looking at Rightmove, it's sad to see an increasing number of properties clearly B&Bs and in 1 case a bunkhouse hostel up for sale. I am assuming that many of these these are coming on the market as the owners just can't make ends meet.

Picking Betws y Coed as an example of extreme touristy area to act as a barometer, looks like you can pickup an 8 bed B&B for ?550,000 or a 6 bed bunkhouse for ?495,000, knockdown prices :( 

If I win 14M on Euromillions tomorrow I think I'll by one, might even pay the current owners to stay and run it for me. If these are businesses that can't make ends meet any more, it's a sad thing for the people's lives and livelihoods
 

PeteHall

Moderator
Either that, or property prices are so high right now, it's a good time to sell up. There's bound to be a crash soon, so buy back again in a couple of years for half the price  (y)
 

tomferry

Well-known member
Price houses are stupid around Northamptonshire their is no hope for the younger generation , you either rent or wait for your relatives to sadly pass away and take over their house ,  out of all of my friends around my age no one can afford a mortgage so they all rent or on council ! Is a terrible circle we are in
 

Speleofish

Active member
I don't know about Betwys y Coed, but most of our local B&Bs seem to be fully booked until November, so those people who haven't been bankrupted completely should be due for a reasonable few months, especially as most of us won't be going overseas this summer.

There's huge interest locally in any house that fits the 'escape to the country' model as long as it has a decent internet connection. Four have sold in our (very small) village in the last month, all within days of going on the market (this is about two years worth of houses in normal circumstances).

The problem is, if you sell up, where do you move to? There's almost nowhere to buy and houses to rent in the country are much scarcer than those in cities. There are new developments on the outskirts of all our local towns but demand is still pretty high and, as Down and Beyond says, house prices are getting a little stupid, even here in Shropshire.
 

mikem

Well-known member
There will also be a backlog of accommodation properties that wanted to sell last year, but didn't get the chance, coming on to the market now.
 

tomferry

Well-known member
2 x 4 bed houses for sale in the village I live in 795k each  ! That ent good for first time buyers !
 

PeteHall

Moderator
Down and beyond said:
2 x 4 bed houses for sale in the village I live in 795k each  ! That ent good for first time buyers !

Ouch!

Bit more reasonable around here (South Glos), but still pretty mad. We'd been planning to move since before all this Covid-city-fleeing/ stamp-duty-holiday madness kicked off, but by the time we got sorted out and on the market it was all nuts. Sold our house no bother for 50% more than we paid 7 years ago (madness, it's the same house and wages sure as hell haven't gone up 50%!), but every house we offered on (even way over asking price) was outbid by a cash buyer from London and we don't even live in a posh village! The last place we tried for went for more than ?100k over the asking price and it was steep to start with. We've given up now; just working out how we can shuffle the kids into the space we have a bit better instead...

Meanwhile, a beach hut in Dorset now costs more than the average UK house price!
 

Speleofish

Active member
The Yurt maker in the next village tells me they're perfect, all-year-round, cheap accommodation.
But he chooses to live in a house....
 

ttxela2

Active member
I bought my first house back in '92 for ?36,500 my salary at the time was in the region of ?10k/year so about 3.5 times my salary. The same house now would cost about ?130k and salary's for similar jobs to what I was doing at the time are about ?22k so now about 6 times the salary.

I remember at the time people saying house prices couldn't go up much further or no-one could afford them. I was 20 when I bought mine but typically people have accomodated the rise in prices by buying much later and now people don't seem to be buying houses until their 30's maybe even 40's.

It's all madness surely?  :-\ :confused:

 

maxb727

Member
PeteHall said:
Down and beyond said:
2 x 4 bed houses for sale in the village I live in 795k each  ! That ent good for first time buyers !

Ouch!

Bit more reasonable around here (South Glos), but still pretty mad. We'd been planning to move since before all this Covid-city-fleeing/ stamp-duty-holiday madness kicked off, but by the time we got sorted out and on the market it was all nuts. Sold our house no bother for 50% more than we paid 7 years ago (madness, it's the same house and wages sure as hell haven't gone up 50%!), but every house we offered on (even way over asking price) was outbid by a cash buyer from London and we don't even live in a posh village! The last place we tried for went for more than ?100k over the asking price and it was steep to start with. We've given up now; just working out how we can shuffle the kids into the space we have a bit better instead...

Meanwhile, a beach hut in Dorset now costs more than the average UK house price!
We wanted to move and found that we weren?t even allowed to look at houses until we had a buyer.

We ended up working out we could keep the house as an investment and rent it out. Making us in the position to buy.

We?ve had an offer accepted on a house at slightly more than asking price but still the right value IMHO. We missed out on others because of the price being super inflated.

It seems to have the best chance of buying currently you need to be chain free. Many friends are selling and moving into rented to then buy. But we didn?t want the hassle
 

2xw

Active member
ttxela2 said:
I bought my first house back in '92 for ?36,500 my salary at the time was in the region of ?10k/year so about 3.5 times my salary. The same house now would cost about ?130k and salary's for similar jobs to what I was doing at the time are about ?22k so now about 6 times the salary.

I remember at the time people saying house prices couldn't go up much further or no-one could afford them. I was 20 when I bought mine but typically people have accomodated the rise in prices by buying much later and now people don't seem to be buying houses until their 30's maybe even 40's.

It's all madness surely?  :-\ :confused:

It'll work out eventually, none of us are having kids
 

PeteHall

Moderator
paul said:
I would say Supply and Demand rather than Madness...

maxb727 said:
It seems to have the best chance of buying currently you need to be chain free. 

These are very closely linked. There are apparently a lot more buyers than sellers, as people buying but not selling to keep themselves chain free. This increases the pressure on supply, increasing the benefit of being chain free and therefore increasing the number of people trying to buy without selling. And around the vicious circle it goes again...  o_O

It feels like the toilet roll shortage all over again, but a lot more expensive! :eek:
 

mikem

Well-known member
Up until the 1960s most people expected to live with their parents until they could afford their own place (or qualify for council housing).
 

pwhole

Well-known member
Of course there's a lot of office buildings doing nothing now that may as well be converted into flats, especially in the City of London. But will they bite the bullet and do it, or try to bribe their business customers back? The ones who all now work at home quite happily on their laptop. There's nowhere near enough houses to go round (or rather there's not enough of the houses people want to buy) and if folks don't want to live near a big city then some green space has to go on new housing. But the people who already live in thise places don't want any more. 'Stop the proposed housing development' is a popular sign in several rural villages I've driven through on jobs.

I worked on a village church in Oxfordshire a while ago and we saw two people in the entire day - the warden who let us in and a lady who went past on a horse at lunchtime. Nobody else for miles, nor in the twenty miles we drove back to the motorway, but plenty of signs protesting about the proposed housing development - and promoting the local tory. Cameron's 'local' is down the road. Ugh. The fields had no crops and no livestock - just picture-postcard landscape, seemingly preserved for the view.

The flip side of this of course is that many of these proposed housing developments churn out the type of citizens who can put off new settlers. I just came back from Eckington and Mosborough, which is 'South Sheffield rustic' - country estate land, with ancient collieries, farms and and woods, but with massive housing estates too, which took all the people who were kicked out of the concrete city hell that was built in the early 1960s and demolished in the late 1980s. They're rough and crude, but they live in the country, and in many ways have restored the 19th Century citizenry model of a semi-rustic workforce - except there's nowhere for them to work now, as the collieries and ironworks aren't there any more. It's a lovely place to live, but it's not posh by any stretch.
 

Speleofish

Active member
The problem with converting offices is that you end up with more city flats (of which there are already huge numbers, usually rental properties) many of which come with cladding issues.

I suspect most people want to live in something that looks like a house. Unless you can rehabilitate brown field spaces, you're going to have to sacrifice land on the outskirts of towns and cities. Or you could build entirely new 'communities' in the middle of nowhere. But, if you're going to do that, you have to ensure you put in the infrastructure that allows a community to develop, unlike many of the places built in in the 60s and 70s with many houses, an occasional shop, but nothing that gives a place a centre or identity.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
That's the real problem here I guess - most of the places we all live in currently have been here for centuries already, in some form or another, and it was more a case of expanding or overlaying what already existed, slowly and carefully, working in and around (or replacing) previous infrastructure, and creating new folklore to go along with it, which would settle the social structures alongside. Creating a new town from scratch can cause all sort of problems because that folklore is missing - I guess the US is a classic example of 'functional town creation', where the place is essentially built to fill a need, in the most 'convenient' spot (avoiding interesting geology), creating a bland, soul-less environment. The best town in the US are the oldest, usually. And embracing interesting geology, like in San Francisco.
 

2xw

Active member
mikem said:
Up until the 1960s most people expected to live with their parents until they could afford their own place (or qualify for council housing).

Into their 30s? My nan and grandad lived with their parents when they got married at 19, and after first child, but they got a council house in early 20s, and my other side was well off so not sure what age people expected to move out? Of course, on average they also expected to inherit a decade earlier...
 

Cantclimbtom

Well-known member
Given "fiscal creep"  (a certain amount money not worth the same as it used to be) the inheritance/gift laws/amounts that were originally intended to redistribute wealth locked up in super rich landed-estates, now apply to inheritance of many ordinary people's estates. Average house price in London is now ?514K and inheritance tax threshold at ?325K. The idea that your house can simply pass to your kids may not work out that way.

 
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