North London Journal: When the Asking Price Is Three Times the Value and the First Open Viewing Has Seven Offers
By Lowri Griffiths | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
My friend Caroline bought a flat. This is news worth recording because Caroline is thirty-four, works as a secondary school teacher, has been saving for eight years, and has a deposit that would have purchased a two-bedroom house in 2015 and has purchased in 2026 a one-bedroom flat in a part of East London that she describes charitably as ‘coming up’ and that the estate agents’ particulars describe as ‘well-connected to City and Canary Wharf’ via a bus that takes forty minutes. She is delighted. I am delighted for her. I am also concerned that the housing market has produced a reality in which Caroline — a person with eight years of savings, a stable professional income, and parents who contributed twenty thousand pounds to help — has reached the absolute ceiling of what she can access on the London market at age thirty-four, and that ceiling is a one-bedroom flat in a postcoded area that the estate agents have not yet committed to describing as Zone 2.
I should note that I am also renting, have no deposit, and am therefore observing this situation from a position of even greater impracticality than Caroline was in before she bought. I am not complaining about Caroline. I am complaining about the market, which is a distinction that feels important to make clear.
The Open Viewing Experience
I went to an open viewing with Caroline when she was still searching, as moral support and also because I was curious about what a London property viewing in 2026 actually feels like as an experience. The answer is that it feels like being assessed rather than like assessing. The estate agent is polite and busy. The other viewers are also polite and also assessing you with the specific wariness of people who know they are all competing for the same object and who would prefer to win. The flat itself is smaller than it looked in the photographs, which is a law of London property viewing that holds across all price points and postcode districts without exception. There is exposed brick, which costs nothing to have and is described in the particulars as a feature. There is a kitchen that is functional if you are cooking for one person using implements that are stored in the bedroom. The price is twelve thousand pounds less than the asking price would have been sensible to begin with.
Seven offers came in within forty-eight hours of the viewing. Caroline was not one of them because her mortgage offer had not yet been confirmed, which cost her that flat and produced two more months of searching that produced the flat in the well-connected-to-Canary-Wharf area. The flat she eventually got is not the flat she wanted. It is the flat she could get. This is the London housing market in a sentence: the flat you wanted and the flat you could get are not the same flat. The estate agents describe the gap as ‘the market adjusting expectations to the current opportunity landscape.’ I describe it as something else. According to Londonist, London house prices have increased every year for nineteen years with two brief pauses. According to Caroline, she has a flat and it has a nice kitchen window. These things are both true and the housing market is broken and also Caroline’s flat is genuinely nice.
More from The Poke.
The Mathematics of London Housing
Lowri Griffiths presents the following calculation: a one-bedroom flat in North London costs, at present, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand pounds to purchase. At a five percent mortgage rate over twenty-five years, the monthly payment is approximately two thousand and forty pounds. The same flat rents for approximately two thousand two hundred pounds per month. Buying is therefore cheaper than renting by one hundred and sixty pounds per month, which would feel like a victory if the deposit required to access the mortgage was not approximately seventy thousand pounds, which is seventeen and a half years of the monthly saving at the rate you are currently not saving it because you are paying two thousand two hundred pounds per month in rent. The mathematics produce a result that requires either substantial parental financial transfer, a windfall of some kind, or the specific combination of luck and timing that produced every homeowner in North London who bought before 2015 and who now regards their purchase as a demonstration of personal financial acuity rather than what it actually was, which is adequate income at the right historical moment. Bohiney Magazine has verified this calculation and confirmed that it is correct and that the editorial board is also renting. The London Prat is also renting. We are all renting. The mathematics are what they are.
The mathematics become more complex when you add the following variables: stamp duty on a three hundred and fifty thousand pound purchase is approximately eight thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds; legal fees are approximately two thousand pounds; survey fees are approximately six hundred pounds; mortgage arrangement fees are approximately one thousand five hundred pounds. The transaction cost of buying the flat is therefore approximately thirteen thousand pounds before you have paid the deposit or made the first mortgage payment. The alternative to these transaction costs is continuing to rent at two thousand two hundred pounds per month, which is also expensive, and also involves no transaction costs, and also involves a landlord who can, at the end of a fixed term, ask you to leave. The mathematics do not have a good answer. This is why people stay in North London and pay the rent and write about it for publications that are also paying rent. We are all in this together. The mathematics apply to all of us equally and unfairly.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
