Vocal Voices

A lot of people will never have heard of it. Gal will though.
It is a little village in Northumberland, on the coast. People go Scuba diving there because the sea is so clear. It has a tiny grade 2 listed harbour and a 1km long beach.
It's nice. Me and MrsC must have been there four or five times on holiday; not for a few years.
it has changed now though. New houses and a little estate of cheapo houses built as holiday lets.
The Beadnell Towers hotel where we stayed a couple of times is now a "boutique" hotel. You know the sort, the one where all the rooms have their own names, not numbers.
Beadnell has got a bit gentrified. Which is a problem. When we went maybe ten years since the lady at the Beadnell Towers told us that 93% of the village was holiday lets. In winter it's like a ghost town.
Newspapers like the Telegraph have contributed to this problem. Every blinking week they print a new place that is "cool", and so much cheaper than London, I suppose.
Literally, every blinking week.
Result of all this is that prices are through the roof and locals can't afford to buy.
BBC story here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-59954627

I realise this is a difficult one but it has to be so maddening for the locals. No way can they afford to buy in the face of buy-to-let and affluent metropolitan types buying a second home.
Now every time I see a newspaper pushing a new "cool" place my blood pressure goes up. It's got worse because of staycations.
Does no one think of the problems for the locals?

It's a big problem in the SW too. Low wages well below the national average, and prices driven up up Londoners buying holiday homes, or but to let

I can well believe it Kaz. The Cotswolds must be especially bad.

Try Cornwall, dreadful state of affairs.

We went to Beadnell when we were in Northumberland in September, I commented it reminded me of Cornwall then it was in the paper as the new SW with Londoners. Wish they would keep their grubby hands to themselves.

The Cornish dont have as big a problem with holiday lets as with second homes. At least holiday lets brings tourism in, and they tend to use local companies to do the repairs and decoration fairly frequently. What they really hate are second homes. Especially like at the top of the hill in Mevagissey, where they buy tired old bungalows, knock them down and build huge great modern piles. They use their London contacts to do all the work, arrive infrequently with their hampers from London and Waitrose, and the rest of the year the house stands empty generating nothing. They absolutely loathe them. In a lot of Cornish towns now, new builds cannot be used as second homes or holiday lets, they have to be bought by people who will live in them as homes. That still doesn't stop the hooray Henry's buying older properties and knocking them down though, that is what they need to stop

cromwell wrote:I can well believe it Kaz. The Cotswolds must be especially bad.

Definitely!

It is a real problem. Not just about second homes and what it does to the community. I mean people sell these homes to those with money and those with money use that money to get their dream home.

They get out of the city, which, with the best will in the world, is hardly a stress reliever. They get these second homes with full intention of coming to live when they are retired from the city. They use them for holidays and a stress buster.

Only to find, when they retire, having sold their mega expensive London pad, that they're now living in a community which really doesn't like them. Because they made not one single iota of effort to be known and understood.

We see this in France a lot. Even more so because old properties are soooo cheap. The house beside us went for under €25k. OK it doesn't have much of a garden and the barn alongside the house is a woodworm paradise with floors so insecure you go right through them. The home portion needs a complete gut and refurb. But at under €25k, that is viable. At least the house was bought by French.

But we have villages around us with less than 50% French occupancy. Certainly they're not all brits, we have Belgians, Germans and Dutch as well. But the Brits are the largest in the community and the least likely to integrate.

We are having a Burns night on Saturty, 17 people invited. 4 of whom are Brits but one of those is the partner of a German friend. It would have been only one Brit but we owe hospitality to two of them and the third is recently separated and we're giving her some time in the community.

That being said, the house across the road is owned by Brits, they are intending to rent the lower half but the upper half is a second home. We might want to whinge about that except the house had been empty for a full decade and looked like sitting for another decade still. The house is large with a decent garden so it attracts pretty large taxes, something the French are not interested in paying.

The house next door to it has also been empty for a decade, it was bought out for a song (government forced sale for unpaid taxes), but he can't sell it on. Nobody is interested and the house doesn't have a kitchen.

Our street is slowly turning into a ghost town and only the incomers with money are revitalising it.

It is easy to complain about those who come in and buy up decomposing homes and create a desirable home, upping the prices around. But the reason that these homes were mouldering away is because the locals already could not afford them and even if they did manage to get them for a song (not likely which is why it was those from the city that bought them), they would not have had the money to upgrade them and also wouldn't be able to afford the council tax.

If a developer was to buy out a bunch of them and develop them into an estate and then sell them off, these houses would also be outside the price of the locals or the developer wouldn't make the money worth doing it in the first place.

There are, however, worse situations in the country. Imagine living in a lovely little bit of the country just outside a major city. Your country income is 15% of the city income, if you are lucky, yet you live within driving commute of the city. Prices are tied to the City wages for the commuters. You are either going to have to go work in the city (if you can), or you are going to rent for your whole life. Worst case you will be driven further and further away from where you grew up because you can't even afford the rent.

I don't see any way of fixing this. It seems to me that any possible cure is going to be worse than the problem.

Buy-to-rent mortgages should end. They only work on the premise that the mortgagee can pay via the rent payments being equal to or more than the mortgage. Without them the homes would be on the open market. Rent-to buy should be increased for all rented properties. New builds, as called for by some residents in Beadnell, are not the answer. They would destroy what is already there.

What I would like to see in these communities, though it will not happen, is the Royston Vasey approach: "This is a local shop for local people. Fortnum's is down the road. Byee."

Yes and no.

Given that the locals simply can't pay the rent on a lot of the places, can't buy them anyway (these big old properties were never in their range), couldn't afford to upgrade them if they did; then the properties would continue to sit there mouldering.

That would then leave all the other properties. The nice, small, comfortable places that could be affordable to rent and even to buy. Those who want a home from home will jump right into this market. They can already afford the mortgage and will maximise their money.

I don't see a way out. Too much money chasing too little stock is always a problem. Concentrated wealth in the major cities is also a problem. For those of us who have lived and worked in London recently, it's not a place designed to be your comfortable retirement home. The only benefit is that you generate huge property wealth which you can go and use to get your comfortable retirement home.

Sadly that means someone else doesn't get their comfortable living and working home because there is too much money chasing too little stock.

I've been there. Locked into local wages next to a capital city with no hope of ever climbing the property ladder without migrating work to the city. Travelling 2-3 hours each way each day or starting the day at 6am and ending it at 7pm, or later.

I killed that whole thing by making my work mobile and earning where the money was but not moving my home. It is stressful, nearly killed my marriage.

Things change. You either change with them or they steamroller you under. Trying to legislate out of it simply won't work. If the people don't come out of the city to buy these properties, the developers will. Then these old houses will still be flattened but they'll be replaced with 8 bedsit properties to cram in the renters and the rent still won't drop much because these are developers. They will want their kilo of flesh and then some.

Sad but true.

We are not taking about big old properties, just ordinary homes. It's the bog standard properties that the BTL "landlords" with government mortgage incentives are buying up these properties. Without the BTL mortgages those properties would be more available to locals. The normal buyer does not have those incentives.

The locals can pay the rent and buy properties, at local prices, and always have been able to do so, it's when the Henry's with money from the cities moved in and turn their affordable houses and homes into 'second homes' and holiday lets that the problems start. We are not talking about derelict mansions, here, we are talking about family homes.

Suff wrote:There are, however, worse situations in the country. Imagine living in a lovely little bit of the country just outside a major city. Your country income is 15% of the city income, if you are lucky, yet you live within driving commute of the city. Prices are tied to the City wages for the commuters. You are either going to have to go work in the city (if you can), or you are going to rent for your whole life. Worst case you will be driven further and further away from where you grew up because you can't even afford the rent.

This is exactly the problem in Dorset, not BTL or second homes. We are, thanks to transport links, commuter-belt London here. Property is said to be going on the market for just three or four days before being snapped up. Prices are through the roof and unaffordable to most locals; rentals are similarly sky-high and that's if you can find one. OK, there is, as there is everywhere, a huge number of new-build projects across the county, but very, very few of these involve affordable housing. There is now a bit of a push-back against the County Council to reduce the number of new houses being planned, largely because Dorset CC has seemingly agreed to "take on" a commitment for 9,000 new homes originally imposed on BCP (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council) who have very little available land. Another concern is that there are some massive solar farms in the process of approval, and I mean massive, some up to 100 ha I think.

Here, we are happily building 1,000 houses on the flood plain south of Gillingham, (yes, they are even marketing it as "Gillingham Lakes") and worse, there is no provision for any major infrastructure improvement; there will only still be the one bridge across the railway line in the town centre funnelling all the north/south traffic in the area. Public opinion counts for nothing, and very little has been thought through.