Lowri Griffiths on the mortgage market, shared ownership, and an estate agent who called a bedsit a ’boutique studio’

LONDON, UK – Three months ago, after a conversation with my mother that began as a phone call about a recipe and ended as an intervention about my financial future, I decided to investigate the London housing market. The investigation is documented here and at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where Lowri Griffiths covers London life. The conclusion, which I will provide now so you can plan your reading time: I will be renting in Finsbury Park for the foreseeable future.

The Mortgage Calculation

The mortgage calculation is the first thing you do and the last thing you want to do, because the result is a number that tells you what you can borrow and the number is almost certainly not enough for the thing you are trying to buy. My number, based on my income and a deposit that represents three and a half years of committed saving and one fortunate inheritance from a great-aunt who turned out to have significantly more Premium Bonds than anyone had expected, is sufficient to purchase a one-bedroom flat in areas I can identify on a map and in areas I cannot.

The areas I can identify: most of East London, parts of South London, portions of Zone 3 and 4 that are described in the listings as well-connected and in practice require a bus connection. The areas I cannot identify: several postcodes in Enfield and one in Sutton that showed up in an automated search and that I have not investigated further because doing so would require accepting that Sutton is where this story ends, and I am not ready for that.

The Estate Agent Experience

I viewed seven properties. Six I will describe collectively as: small, needing attention, located near something that made a noise at the viewing that I could not identify, and priced at a level that required me to accept that potential is a real estate synonym for currently inadequate. The seventh was described as a boutique studio apartment with characterful original features and excellent natural light, which turned out to mean a bedsit with a window onto a ventilation shaft and a kitchen attached to the bedroom by a partition that stopped eighteen inches short of the ceiling. The natural light was notional. The characterful original features were a sealed fireplace and a bathroom tile from approximately 1978. I did not make an offer. The property sold the following week for PS15,000 above the asking price.

The Shared Ownership Question

Shared ownership, which allows buyers to purchase between 25 and 75 percent of a property and pay rent on the remainder, has been presented to me by no fewer than four people as the solution to the London housing problem that I personally face. The scheme is managed through housing associations; the government provides guidance through Help to Buy resources. I looked into it carefully.

The complications: the lease terms on shared ownership properties are typically long leaseholds with service charges that are frequently high and unpredictably variable. The process of buying additional shares involves fees at each stage that reduce the financial advantage over full ownership. The properties available tend to be in new developments, which are fine and sometimes excellent, but which carry the specific quality of having been built quickly in a style that will date in ways that period properties do not. None of this is disqualifying. It is the shape of the available options. For more on London housing, see The Guardian Housing.

My Conclusion

I am staying in Finsbury Park. The deposit is going back into the ISA. My mother has accepted this, after a further phone call that began as a discussion of the housing market and ended with her sending me a link to houses in Cardiff available for PS165,000, which is the price of a parking space in one of the developments I viewed, and which I have bookmarked in a folder titled Eventually, which represents the kind of contingency planning that London eventually requires of everyone who has been here long enough. For more on first-time buyers, see NewsThump.

Further Reflection

The week described above sits within a longer pattern that is worth documenting. London journalism, whether about business, royals, culture, or politics, requires a sustained attention that individual articles rarely capture. The diary is the form that allows the accumulation, and the accumulation is what makes the individual pieces possible over time. Without the sustained observation, the observation itself becomes thin, relying on the most visible surface of a story rather than the texture that makes it significant. This publication, through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, is committed to the texture rather than the surface, which is why the diary format exists alongside the more conventional journalism.

The city continues to produce material at a rate that exceeds any single writer’s capacity to process it in real time. What I am doing in this diary, and what the published pieces do in their more finished form, is a selection from the available material, guided by what seems most illuminating rather than most immediately newsworthy. The distinction between illuminating and newsworthy is the distinction between journalism and literature, and the best journalism occupies the space between them, using the techniques of one to achieve the purposes of the other. I am trying to occupy that space consistently, which is harder than either pure journalism or pure literature and more satisfying than either when it works. The week that produced this diary entry was one in which it worked more often than it did not, which is the standard I measure against and which I do not always meet but which is worth maintaining as the target. For more London journalism and satire, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/