Reminiscing

[ATTAK Z]

Just noticed my old property is for sale with an asking price of £285,000.00 ... I moved in the day that Elvis died (1977) having spent a year building it with my own hands (did everything except the plastering and putting the roof tiles on) ... I built it for a total cost of £14K including the cost of the land (I had to sell the E-Type to pay some bills) and sold it 4 years later for £40K and bought the house I live in now for £32K which left enough money to buy a few toys including a 5 series BMW ...

 

How things change with time ...

[Ekona]

I remember our last place, which was also my first, cost the previous owner £58K to buy. We paid £128K for it just two years later in 2003. Not quite as impressive a set of figures as yours, but it does show how the market leapt in the early Noughties.

 

One guy I was chatting with at work a few years back said he bought his place for about £6K in the Sixties, and was then worth about £300K. I did some back of fag packet maths and worked out that, if house prices rose by the same amount over the next forty years or so, that my house would be worth about £14M which seems bonkers But then, I'm guessing £300K also seemed bonkers back in the Sixties so who knows?

[ATTAK Z]

Yea my first house was £3500 including central heating (a £500 extra) and I had to sell my Series IV sunbeam Rapier for a deposit

[G1en]

Its that old saying, you cant go wrong putting your money into bricks and mortar. And med-long term it still seems true. I wonder how many People (esp down south) are “on paper” millionaires now purely on the back of their house price. 

I also watched something about Gold prices shooting through the roof over the same period.

just think if you bought a gold house back in the seventies 

[Sargara]

My aunt was able to buy her first house in the city centre of Lincoln for less than her yearly salary that she made from teaching at the time. My god it must be a nice feeling to be able to do that, what is it now 4x, 5x etc on average the typical salary?

 

Something has to give eventually, all these buy to let landlords treating housing as profit by buying up the traditional first time buyer stock and then letting it out. (just for balance I am a home owner myself)

Edited November 13, 2017 by Sargara

[rabbitstew]

I remember back in 1998 I was renting a house in Peterborough and the owner offered it to me to buy for £42k. It was a fairly new 2 bed semi, nice location and 12 minutes walk into the city centre. I turned it down as I was in the middle of changing jobs. As it was I ended up buying a house in Peterborough a few years later. I should have bought the 2 bed semi as I could have always rented it out and now today its worth about £160k.

 

However, my previous house, I paid £80k for it in 2001, spent about £40k on renovating it and then 10 years later sold it for £150k. I worked out that if I had rented instead of bought, and kept the extra cash I had paid out on the mortgage and renovations in savings account over those 10 years I would actually have been better off.

 

Its varies a lot depending on area and type of house bought.

[JetSet]

Interesting. I bought my first house, a semi, for £6,600 in 1973 and sold it for £8,100 in 1978. I then stretched myself to the absolute limit to buy my present property for £16,500 . also in 1978. With interest rates going as high as 17 or even 18% in the early 1980's it was something of a struggle and I dread to think what would happen if interest rates shoot up again even to the 7 or 8% which was the norm right through the 70's and late 80's through to the early 2000's.

 

Pete

[rabbitstew]

9 hours ago, JetSet said:

 I dread to think what would happen if interest rates shoot up again even to the 7 or 8% which was the norm right through the 70's and late 80's through to the early 2000's.

 

I was locked into a 7.5% fixed rate mortgage for a long time in the 2000`s. This was when the rates happily dropped down to nearly nothing. In the end I paid a large penalty and got out of the mortgage and switched to a variable.

[gangzoom]

19 hours ago, JetSet said:

Interesting. I bought my first house, a semi, for £6,600 in 1973 and sold it for £8,100 in 1978. I then stretched myself to the absolute limit to buy my present property for £16,500 . also in 1978. With interest rates going as high as 17 or even 18% in the early 1980's it was something of a struggle and I dread to think what would happen if interest rates shoot up again even to the 7 or 8% which was the norm right through the 70's and late 80's through to the early 2000's.

 

Pete

 

There's a whole generation of home owners who have know nothing but <3% rates. 

 

I cannot complain about low interest rates, we wouldnt find it much harder to justify the house we are in how if interest rates were higher......which is why I got a 20 year term rather than 25 and aiming to overpay 10% a year. So when rates do go up we woudlnt feel the effects as badly.