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You appear to be assuming that I live in the US and that I spend frivolously. Both assumptions are incorrect. In fact, I live in Cambridge, UK, where we're comfortably in the London commuter belt and have many nice new million pound flats for sale. On the other hand, if you're a nurse working at the local hospital and you want to raise your kids in your own house, you can expect to live far outside the city with a substantial commute into work. Because, you know, we don't overwork and underpay our medical practitioners already in this country! I do know people around my age who have managed to buy in the city itself, but almost all of them had an unusual source of serious money for someone our age, and often for an unfortunate reason (big inheritance that arrived a lot earlier than expected, compensation lawsuit, that kind of thing). A few bought very young and got lucky to be on the ladder before prices got really crazy, though for every one of those I probably know someone else whose financial development was set back a decade after finding themselves in negative equity too early in their careers to cope with it. In any case, the latter was never an option for people a decade younger who are in the middle of that Millennial bracket and might traditionally have been buying their own place by that stage of their lives. For "normal" people (and remember there's quite a high upper bound on what I'm calling "normal" in this discussion) looking for a normal family house because they've had a new baby or relocated to change jobs or have an elderly relative moving in, the reality here is that by the time they have got home from work, seen a nice place in the listings, and called the estate agent to arrange a viewing, the property has often already been sold. The better-looking properties are currently being bought literally within minutes of being available and without the purchaser even visiting them, such is the confidence in the market that the property can be sold at a substantial profit in a few months even if it turns out to have problems on closer inspection. Sealed bids is becoming a popular sale method, and winning bids on £400-500K family homes are coming in £100K+ over. No normal person can compete with professionals who have the time and resources to play the game by those rules. |