Moronic thing for him to say. My parents bought their 1st house in early 70s. Only Dad was working but pretty junior & yet was able to buy a new 3 bed terraced hse with a good sized garden in Kent. We had a car & holidays (in UK) & mod cons in the house.
Looked up what it's worth now. Abt £300k!!
I remember my Dad was on £14k in the late 70s after a good promotion so was on much less early 70s. He was an insurance clerk when I was little. Not many of them on the £77k now required to get a £270k mortgage after saving up for a £30k deposit!!
No chance I'm 40 years old have £18,000 saved and have no chance instead I'm paying £1000 rent £400 in bills but I can't afford to pay a £700 mortgage on a flat. RIDICULOUS
Politics Joe had a YouTube video interviewing young Reform members. One guy articulately point out that if you earn 30k and take home 24k, assuming you buy an average house 267k you’ll probably pay 500k inc interest. 500k out of a total 40-year earnings of 960k, so way over half your earnings.
Absolutely - NO it wasn’t. You didn’t need the bank of Mum & Dad - I wouldn’t have had access to that!! You earned a decent salary in ordinary non-professional job that meant you could save a deposit. House builders/landlords weren’t making outrageous profits at expense of “ordinary working people”
The big difference was that the lending ratios were quite strict, which meant certain areas were unaffordable - but for the majority, it was much, much easier than it is today.
In 1970 I was 21 & on a grant of £210pa. My boyfriend was on the dole £5pw.
The Abbey Nat gave us a 100% mortgage to buy a 2up2down in good nick in Manchester's curry mile for £750.
AN's comments about our income - It can only get better!
Repayments £2.35pw.
Former flat rent £8.40pw.
Easy & sensible
Don't listen to Alan he can'tbe trusted. He worked on Peeble Mill back in the day. A show which allowed Rotherham's own Paul Shane to butcher a Righteous Brothers classic.
We bought our first house in 1979. It most definitely was not as difficult to buy then as it is now,despite the high interest rates. My heart breaks for young people now attempting to get that first foothold on the housing ladder. Our youngest son is one of them. It's unbelievabley hard.
Contrast and compare..
Me, builders labourer, my wife a student nurse.
I've done back-of-a-fagpacket maths and the deposit for our house in 1983 was roughly 10wks pay.
Today, using average UK house prices and median wage, you're looking at around 10 mnths pay.
Mr Titcharsh is talking thru his arse.
No surprise to hear Titchmarsh talking boll*cks, but really? In 1980 I bought a house for 4x my university salary. When I sold it in 2004 it was for about 15x the equivalent salary, way beyond any possible reach for someone in a similar job to mine when I bought.
You could buy a terraced house in Bradford for less than £1000 in the 1970's when I was earning £19 a week in the mill. That was only 52 weeks wages. Today those houses go for as much as £200000. That's over 450 weeks wages. He is talking out of his backside.
Hang on a mo! We moved out of London after a couple of years when first married because it was obvious we would not be able to afford a house there. We knew people using cardboard for carpets because they had beggared themselves to buy a London flat.
So it depended where one lived. We eventually got a new house at Warrington through a new town starter scheme. But interest rates (if memory serves) were between 10-15%.
This 'we had to deal with 10-15% interest rates' argument is extremely spurious. A 10-15% interest rate on a £15,000 mortgage is a lot different to a 5% interest rate on a £300,000 mortgage. I know which one I'd prefer, and it ain't the 5%!!
There are always fluctuations but the stats still speak for themselves, house prices now are a far greater multiple of wages than they were in the 70s. And that's before we even talk about young people needing to find massive deposits while paying high rents.
That was certainly my experience of the outer London suburbs (which is why we started in Slough and then moved further out) but I knew a couple of people who bought houses in Clapham and got grants to refurbish them.
Difficult to compare the two eras, I guess. I can only go by my own experience, and it certainly did not feel 'easy' at the time. But my heart goes out to today's young people, looking at the astronomical prices now just for a small property.
So was inflation and wage growth. I think it is very important to remember that high interest rates then paired with the capital of any mortgage devaluing rapidly.
The barriers then were largely artificial like the 3 times salary cap. If you paid off the various parasites that infested the property market you could get a bigger mortgage.
One of the key differences between today and that era is not just that the amount borrowed initially was worth significantly less but also that inflation very quickly ate away at that, too. Before even remembering MIRAS!
And the proportion of a twenty-something’s income that swallowed up in rent while they try to save a deposit of 10-20% I admit I don’t have data, but I don’t think that was quite the same in the 70s
Many of the lucky, older home-owning generation should ask themselves if they could afford to buy their home now, with their wages from their younger days ........ I know that my answer would be a definite 'no' and I bought in the high interest Thatcher era 🤔🤔
Absolutely, he’s obviously lost his memory. I bought my flat in the 80’s and it wasn’t easy but it was achievable which it wouldn’t be now. I think it would have been even easier in the 70’s apart from me being too young!
Even in the '80s you could buy a three bedroom semi-detached for £30,000. That was still only 2x salary for many people. But also, 5% interest on £30,000 is lot more affordable than 5% interest on £300,000.
When your lane is either gardening or erotic stories for old ladies, you’d think it would be easier to stay in said lane.
The rest of the world must be a very scary place that is very difficult to understand.
Lewis, trying to buy a house in the 1970's as a single woman was almost impossible.
I bought a house in 1979 and there was only ONE building society that would lend to single women.
I’m fairly sure that this isn’t what Titchmarsh is talking about but I do remember the bloke I was apprenticed to telling me (after I had bought a flat in ‘89) that when he was that age his bank manager told him he could only hand out 3 mortgages a month.
A lot of the oldies say this. What they mean is that interest rates were much higher, and most people had to use building society loans. Banks didn't lend to ordinary folk. However, my father reckons it was easier to accumulate capital in the 70s. Inflation has eroded people's ability to save.
Well in the 70s somethings were slower - manual typing, post, ordering searches, unregistered land (🤮) but people were experienced and expectations were lower. Costs per transaction were very high so lawyers could have fewer files and manage them better.
Now - email, precedents in case management, online ordering of searches, but the costs per transaction have not kept pace with inflation so lawyers take on more work than they can manage, constantly being interrupted by emails/phone calls as people want everything now. And people are unqualified.
Which is how my kids have managed to buy, but it meant them moving far away from friends and family to do so. I didn't have to do that in 1977, I could buy just up the road from where I grew up in London.
I tried to get my first mortgage in 1978. They seemed to be rationed and the finance sector still discriminated against women. I'd paid into a building society by bank transfer for a few years but my local branch wouldn't even consider me because it said I hadn't saved with it directly.
The problems were different but it wasn't easy. When I did find a mortgage provider it was limited to 2x salary which put most properties way outside my reach even then. At least in those days rental options were much better because Thatcher hadn't broken the public sector with right to buy policy.
My parents bought the house my Mum still lives in in London NW5 for £7,000 in 1970. My Dad was earning £25 a week. My Mum was working part-time for about £10 a week. The same house now would cost around £2 million. My Dad would be earning around £40,000 a year, my Mum maybe £25,000. Do the maths!
Back in the 70's what helped to hold back mortgage costs was that mortgage lenders - in the main building societies - only lent on the basis of earnings, with the most generous being 3 times the higher salary and 1 times the lower.
TBF, interest rates were much higher, but it was only really a problem for the first 2 or 3 years. After that, inflation had increased your salary significantly but the mortgage payment stayed the same.
Thing is, 20% (don't think they ever got that high) of £220,000 (if house prices had matched wage increase) is £44,000, to be paying the same amount in interest for a £2 million home interest rates would have to be 2.2%
It's why comparing the percentage when the value has changed is problematic
I bought a one bedroom new build flat in 1978 on a university lecturer’s salary plus some part time work. Wouldn’t be possible today. Helped enormously that my tuition and accommodation costs were covered by grants.
This isn't completely straightforward. As an 'ordinary working man' and the only wage earner at the time, we did indeed buy our own house in 1978 but we had to move out of London to a different part of the country to do that. Same applied to my contemporaries. London was out of the question.
Because then these 55+ pub bores can move onto "the real problems" - lazy, entitled kids and immigrants - while celebrating their own "hard work" and financial savvy
Heh, chose 55 because I was born (UK) 1970 and remember peers on ~£22k buying flats in Peckham for 3x salary in mid/late-90s, my younger sister & her younger husband getting a house in Plymouth on similar terms. But suspect the door then closed (I left UK in '97)
We got married in 1975 we paid £6750 for our 3 bed terrace in Liverpool. The same house would now be £125000. My guess is that our total income in 1975 was around the value of that house.
Certainly not in Scotland. An offer, a verbal acceptance, NO GOING BACK, and everything was signed, sealed and delivered in a few weeks. How did the lawyers survive without dragging it out for month??
In 2002, we bought our first house. Decent mortgage, deposit was just under 1/4 of our combined annual income.
A decade later, my cousin needed well over 1/2 their combined annual wage just for the deposit. & every time they scraped enough, prices rose, as did deposits - they lost out on 3 houses.
Sort of, yes. The Wilson government restricted bank lending, forbad Building Societies to raise interest rates, and froze wage & price rises. Mortgages were almost all issued by Building Societies, who couldn't access funds for lending so they were much harder to come by.
Tbf it depends on what house. I'm sure it was just as difficult to buy a 20 bedroom mansion on a large estate in Oxfordshire in the 1970s as it is to buy a 1 bedroom flat in Dagenham today.
I totally accept your point but it depends how the data is compiled. Just as an example very few people under 30 owned a car, or went on foreign holidays in the 70’s. So many factors, all having an impact to a greater, or lesser extent. Life was difficult then but maybe in different ways than today.
It doesnt really matter how the data is compiled. House prices are now many times more the average salary than they where in the 70s. Rents have increased massively, (9% in the last year) and young people are expected to bear these costs AND pay for an ever largening state pension they willnever get
I’m not trying to say the situation isn’t really difficult for young people today it is and I sympathise. However it wasn’t a bed of roses for my generation. I’m 81 and retired at 70. During the 60’s and 70’s life was hard financially. I worked 60 hours a week on average + 10 days annual holiday.
I ofcourse understand that. But what I'm trying to get through to you is that life in Britain as a young person isn't all netflix and frothy coffees. It's the realisation that you'll never be able to own a home, but will have to pay for someone else's mortgage over and over and over again.
Like, I'm really sorry - but we both grew up and spend our working lives in *entirely* different states. Your generation was so large it was able to warp spending priorities towards it at each elex and is therefore the richest gen this country will ever see
Absolutely it wasn’t. As a 22 yr old w/c woman earning much less than husband which was usual then, a quarter of my salary and 3 times husbands average salary got a mortgage on 3 bed semi-det house. Saved deposit in 2 yrs
Nope. My parents made $35k in the 70s, and a great house was$20k. Now they would make about $200k, but the houses would start at $500k. Do the math and add in healthcare and utilities.
Absolute garbage.A mortgage back then was generally 3xSalary paid back over roughly 30 years. And it was exactly the same when I bought my first property in the early ‘90s. People on a normal wage could actually buy somewhere to live back then.
Yup, and back then it was IIRC cheaper to rent than to buy. We now have the surreal situation where it's cheaper to pay a mortgage than it is to rent!!!!!!
If he can't see this, he's been huffing too much compost.
They normally say “cut back on the Starbucks” or some such nonsense. Unless you’re getting through about a hundred coffees a week the saving really isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference.
It was different. Even with small savings pots in several Building Societies we struggled to get a mortgage until we lied to obtain a car loan and chucked it into the deposit. When I was pregnant in 1976/7 the mortgage rate went up to 14%. We didn't have the bank of mum and dad to help.
Bought first house with then partner in 1984. 3 bed in Walthamstow Village, £29, 500. Deposit 10%. We jointly earned £16,500 (mortgage 2.5 x first salary, 2 x second). Interest rates 15% (although it soon came down). Much, much easier/affordable than today.
Not sure, I wasn't there for most of the 70s. I'm pretty sure if it was difficult it wasn't for the same reasons and the alternatives were better.
With decent social housing there's little need to buy and rent helps the council. Renting is often more expensive than a mortgage - if you can get one.
It was in fact harder, in one way and in one way only: women often couldn't get a mortgage based on their own salary. That's obviously what campaigning feminist Alan Titchmarsh means.
Totally this, this, this!
Mum and I moved to a council house in f***ing Northampton in 1978 and we were lucky to get it! It was that or stay in the mouldy bedsit in Brentford (which gave me pneumonia) or get married ro some other wife beating c***. People forget the context.
YES! Stories about ‘my parents…’ actually mean ‘my dad’. Women would need their husband or father to guarantee any borrowing. They’d be turned down because ‘you’ll give up work when you get married’. As late as the 90s banks asked women their intentions to continue working when they’d had children.
And even if you were one of a couple, your mortgage provider wouldn't add your salary to your husband's in calculating how much they would lend. They might kindly add 20%. If you were the bigger earner, that was a killer
early / mid 1970s house prices SWest went from £6k to £9k in a very short time .
Mortgages from Mutual Building Societies ….lenders money in borrowers out.
In 1974 there was a mortgage famine, we had to phone up Abbey National to see if we could even get an appointment, it never happened. The Gov stepped in to help free up the funds
Today's London average salary is £47k, old school mortgage lending around x3.5 salary would mean finding a house for £175k.
Average house price in UK is £288k.
Titchmarsh is talking out of his posterior 👽
It wasn’t easy Lewis. We married in 1974 & it was tough. It involved more than a couple of lies & a lot of trauma but we managed it. Our first home was £9.5k and a mortgage of & £84pm made my mum cry. However, I agree we wouldn’t have made it today.
Similar story. 19, married & couldn’t get a mortgage so went with a new fangled housing association purchase. Lived on potato stew & did a cleaning job after work. Even that wouldn’t cut it these days.
We borrowed to our absolute limit to buy our first house in 1973. Within months inflation hit 15% and mortgage repayments DOUBLED! Car laid up, housekeeping cut by 1/3rd. We had NOTHING!
The mortgage rate was around 15-17% mid 70’s. Low pay in the NHS made things very difficult, in 1976/7 we had a 17% pay rise so things were a tad easier but our salary was still way behind other public sector jobs, police etc
Just infuriating mate. And I'll be paying their extra large state pensions they denied to their own elders for the rest of my life to add to the bargain.
My pension is not great by any stretch, I worked 40 yrs at the sharp end, one Xmas off when I had pneumonia so I never spent Xmas with my mum& dad all that time, put up with rude and arrogant behaviour but still made them better. Yes I chose the profession but not the abuse
No, it wasn't. My first house (1968) was a 3 bed semi new build and cost £3,125, my annual salary was £850. So, about 3½ times my salary. I sold it for about £125k!
Yup. A lad I knew had loaded up wth ten properties bought on mortgage with deposits on credit cards in 87 and 88. Last seen getting on a plane to Thailand.
In terms of affordability clearly not. But back then it was very difficult to meet a lot of the other criteria that nowadays is replaced by credit scoring. You needed an impeccable & unbroken employment record & there were all kinds of qualitative (ie wildly subjective) personal criteria.
My parents got their first mortgage back in the 60s when lenders routinely refused foreigners & PoC. It was primarily because the local building soc manager knew them as longtime savers and took a shine to them. He went out on a limb personally to swing it.
I've had them (let's call the 'boomers' for simplicity) say 'I worked bloody hard for my deposit for my house in the 70s' then going on Latte & Netflix nonsense about why young people can't do same today.
Interest rates mean f all, 100% of £1 does not compare to 1% of £1M. Affordability is the only metric that matters and it is far worse. A key to your point, you struggled to afford once you had a mortgage. try getting a deposit together on current house prices to be able to get a mortgage.
The 80's interest rate lasted 5 minutes in comparison to today's actual purchase prices and I was still able to buy my first house on a multiple of 3 times my individual income as a trainee in Reading.
Theresa it was difficult for a short period but we still managed to buy. I'm64 so went through that time. However a much greater % cannot buy now. To compare the two eras and draw large similarities is wrong.
I was only pointing out the interest rate we had to pay. Not making a comparison. The fact is it is usually hard to buy, we had to save for a deposit while paying rent too & sacrifices are obviously made while saving & also buying.
Well we didn't find it laughable I can assure you, with a baby & bugger all in the house. It was a rotten time. And I know it's hard these days - our own kids bought houses the last few years too. I stated a fact which isn't in dispute.
People are doing that now. They often can't afford to buy and start a family until they're in their late 30s or even 40s. And many never manage to buy at all. Added to that renting is vastly more expensive than it was then so saving is harder.
Yeah mates of mine bought a flat in London after graduating with a 105% mortgage in around 2001 or so I think? Although they went into it pretty blithely it ended up working out EXTREMELY well for them
I think a lot of people did it without thinking too hard, because it felt like free money! But I doubt many lost money buying London property then - some have made an absolute packet.
Suspect a mortgage felt out of reach for lots of people who could maybe, at a stretch, have managed it and come out much better off. But the less financially secure you are, the less you can afford to take risks on interest rates etc.
Rubbish. My dad told me that their mortgage payment was a quarter of their income when he was working on building sites and admitted that they'd overcooked it on the basis he would earn more soon.
My parents, both teachers, bought their 1st house just before I was born (late 1968) for £2000 aged 24 based on 1 salary. I'm their 2nd child. My mum didn't work again until I started school.
None of this is economically possible today.
(I know he said 1970's but the point applies).
there's so much variability - & it was different, especially interest rates. Location matters, it always did, and you never know which areas outperform others. Our first house (early 80s) was 33k now 375k (that's not London) & that's no longer 3 x joint income of early career salaries.
Did an example for some in my local Labour WhatsApp group who were insisting the same. House last sold in my street in 1998, sold & current prices from Zoopla. Assume 10% deposit and mortgage 4 times one persons salary you’d have needed to earn 110% of the London average salary in 1998 and 345% now
At the end of 1978 rates were about 12%, by nov 79 they reached 17%. It was hard to get a mortgage during the 70’s. IFAs that were well connected could do it. But the lending criteria was different and house prices were so low it’s not comparable to today.
We bought our place in 1977. In 1979 I actually stopped working for nearly a year to go to college so we were living on one wage. In 1981 I gave up work completely for 7 years. My husband was a Clerical Officer not a banker.
My Mum and Dad built their first house in 61, bought a plot and with the help of a couple of friends it was done 2 years later and cost £4,000. They both worked full time, it was their goal. Mum stopped work when I turned up. I saw the place for sale a few years ago… best part of a million quid 😬
If you were a first time buyer in the 70s you are not a first timer now. I would not presume to tell first timer's that I had the same issues as they have. Titch should know better, but he is the type that likes to say stop whining as an answer to serious questions.
No it really wasn't. My ex and I were able to buy a home in Hanwell W London in 1977 at the age of 19 and 20 when we were both Clerical Officers in the Civil Service earning fuck all (and I daresay people at that grade earn even less now). And I stopped work completely 4 years later (babies).
The financial crisis had nothing to do with UK mortgages and everything to do with US finance companies bundling and selling on debt from sub-prime mortgages. My parents could buy because a house only cost 3x their student grant.
(If you have memories of how hard it was for you, because you bought at the time of one of those 'upticks' in the 70s, the correct response to seeing what has happened in the last few decades should not be 'yeah we had it tough as well' but more like 'oh man things are *even worse* now huh?')
Absolutely. My parents bought the house I grew up in for £4k in 1972. My mum was still at uni and my dad had a temporary job at Terry's chocolate factory in York. Pretty sure you wouldn't be able to borrow enough to buy a shed with that nowadays
My grandparents were working class 1st-gen immigrants (seamstress and joiner). They bought a decent 4 bed house in SE London in the 70s as well as having 4 kids. I’m a lawyer and my husband works in IT, we don’t have kids and we barely afforded a flat outside London.
My father bought his first property in 1970 for £5,000. It was a 10 minute walk to the train station and a 20 minute journey to central London. He was able to put down a 50% deposit on it.
Buying it was exactly as difficult. *Paying* for it, on the other hand...
I bought my first house in 1991 for 150k, sold it for 300k in 2006. Paid 450 for the current place, going rate in the road is about 1m (2 sales last year).
Have you looked at data for the percentages of people buying their own homes from the 70's and now? Do you acknowledge that more and more young people are living with their parents? Do you acknowledge that the age of people starting mortgages is very likely to be higher? 1
Lived experience is no different from the bloke in the pub who smoked twenty a day and lived beyond the average age of mortality, do you think smoking does not cause cancer?
His ‘lived experience’ only covers purchasing a house in the 70s though doesn’t it. He’s not giving any real insight, he’s just saying it was hard back then.
I bet he’s bought more than one house since then. And I also bet that almost no-one throwing rocks has even heard of the term “credit controls”. The 1970s was a very different world.
Haha Alan Titchmarsh buying additional properties for his portfolio does not give him an understanding of a young person today trying to get on the property ladder.
I think buying a house at that time was difficult _in very different ways_ to how it is now, and consequently young and old really don't see eye to eye on this.
It clearly wasn’t as difficult as it is now.
We bought our first flat in 1978 - it certainly *felt* difficult to us (lots of borrowing restrictions and high interest rates), but we always knew the difficulties weren’t insurmountable.
Very different for first time buyers now.
Although to your first point here, it's really the experience of buying the first property which counts, surely? Since once you're in the market any difficulties you experience are again very different.
I wouldn’t expect people’s experience to translate across half a century. The inequality and hardship was different but still real: ordinary working class people still got the shitty end of the stick. That economics has changed a lot doesn’t change that.
Comments
Looked up what it's worth now. Abt £300k!!
The Abbey Nat gave us a 100% mortgage to buy a 2up2down in good nick in Manchester's curry mile for £750.
AN's comments about our income - It can only get better!
Repayments £2.35pw.
Former flat rent £8.40pw.
Easy & sensible
Me, builders labourer, my wife a student nurse.
I've done back-of-a-fagpacket maths and the deposit for our house in 1983 was roughly 10wks pay.
Today, using average UK house prices and median wage, you're looking at around 10 mnths pay.
Mr Titcharsh is talking thru his arse.
If he means difficult in terms of the bureaucracy then he ain't wrong.
She was dependent on my stepfather paying the mortgage.
Watch the Good Life.
You might learn something.
Now, people need 7x salary or more.
My parents bought their first home in 1973 age 21, with no family money, having left school at 15 and on factory worker salaries.
The rest of the world must be a very scary place that is very difficult to understand.
I bought a house in 1979 and there was only ONE building society that would lend to single women.
It's why comparing the percentage when the value has changed is problematic
House my parents bought in 1976 (they were 30 & 32) in SW18 for 13k would now cost about 1.4M to buy (maybe 1.1M as it needs work)
A decade later, my cousin needed well over 1/2 their combined annual wage just for the deposit. & every time they scraped enough, prices rose, as did deposits - they lost out on 3 houses.
It sold in 2011 for £320,000, around 12.3x average salary
It sold again this year for £550000, 14.6 average salary
Titchmarsh is talking through his dibber
Crap like that makes me so angry.
If he can't see this, he's been huffing too much compost.
With decent social housing there's little need to buy and rent helps the council. Renting is often more expensive than a mortgage - if you can get one.
Mum and I moved to a council house in f***ing Northampton in 1978 and we were lucky to get it! It was that or stay in the mouldy bedsit in Brentford (which gave me pneumonia) or get married ro some other wife beating c***. People forget the context.
Mortgages from Mutual Building Societies ….lenders money in borrowers out.
This statement is the very definition of privilege.
More gaslighting of the poor by the rich.
He'll be driving to London in a tractor next.
Average house price in UK is £288k.
Titchmarsh is talking out of his posterior 👽
It was just much easier, I don't know why it's so hard for older people to accept this.
That means you had access to the final salary pension scheme that isn't available to any worker now because it is so generous.
NOOONE working today in Britain has access to such generous pension schemes.
Got a 1k grant to put bath and kitchen on - sold it in 1976 £11.5k
Much less chance of youngsters now getting on the property ladder, even if both of them are working.
I've had them (let's call the 'boomers' for simplicity) say 'I worked bloody hard for my deposit for my house in the 70s' then going on Latte & Netflix nonsense about why young people can't do same today.
Why can't they admit their privilege?
So it was hard.
Adjusted for inflation, £54k and £18,785.
A similar house today is on sale for £442,000.
Nuf said
None of this is economically possible today.
(I know he said 1970's but the point applies).
Personal experience!!!
Tell us what % of average salary the deposit was?
https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/income-to-house-price-ratio-more-than-doubles-since-the-70s.html
Then the interest rates went north
I bought my first house in 1991 for 150k, sold it for 300k in 2006. Paid 450 for the current place, going rate in the road is about 1m (2 sales last year).
We bought our first flat in 1978 - it certainly *felt* difficult to us (lots of borrowing restrictions and high interest rates), but we always knew the difficulties weren’t insurmountable.
Very different for first time buyers now.