Viewed a 2-bed flat for rent in Chiswick last saturday and then discovered the landlord trying to rent independently via the Loot. Knew from the agent that they are desperate to let asap. Put in an offer today of £1000pcm (asking is about £1200pcm) and the reply was;



Can't believe what tight margins these people are operating on. If they let it through the agent they wouldn't be getting much more than the £1000 I offered after agent fees etc. They sound quite desperate though, having to find over £1000 a month extra to pay the mortgage on their BTL!

I'll keep you updated.....

these muppets were prepared to work on such tight margins because they thought short term capital gains would bail them out.......

A guy who used to work with me used to rent a house in Chiswick with a few of his mates. They spent money like they owned the place.

Never did get on the housing ladder, no savings - emigrated disillusioned in 2000.

Why do you need to rent in Chiswick? It's an expensive luxury.

A two bed flat that close to London for a grand a month is not at all bad?
If you work in London your not going to want to travel 2 hours a day and thats a half hour ride on the tube to CL.
I cant see the problem with that looks a good deal for the area (IMO).

Many of us don't have the luxury of living with our parents if we want to work in London and unable to get on the property ladder I'm not prepared to keep slumming it in the shit locations, spent 18 months in Brixton once and hated it. £1000 for a 2-bed flat would actually be a steal for this area, be hard to pay less anywhere other than the likes of Peckham. £1200 wouldn't even be overpriced. What would you propose I did IS - put up a tent in Hyde Park?

Ignorant Steve,

Renting there may be a luxury, but personally while I'm saving for a deposit I'm not going to live in a dingy bedsit.

I can pay only £600 in rent for what would cost me £950 on an IO mortgage.

Why not splash out? If you can still save then you can live wherever the feck you like.


My current landlord is in trouble too.
2 weeks till I move out:
He has had 1 viewing and no offers (not even a cheeky one).
He has had 1 viewing to re-let it, and they didn't seem interested.

He admits that even if he gets £30 a month more than we're paying now (thats what its being advertised for - won't get it IMHO) that it won't even cover the IO mortgage that he has, and thats with a 20% deposit.

And it has been valued by the EA at about the same price he purchased for 2 years ago, so he is likely looking at losing some of his deposit even if he does manage to sell.

I can imagine a few landlords I've known being in similar positions...

Wasn't having a go (for once). Just genuinely interested. Chiswick is neither very close to the centre of London to be an easy commute nor is it far enough out to be cheap(ish).

Surely Acton would give you a similar journey to work for much less rent.

Short bus ride to Chiswick for the nightlife (or whatever).

About 6 months ago I was living in a 1st floor flat. The landlord decided to sell it, so as luck would have it (so I thought) a flat in the next building along was also available to rent. I moved to the other flat.

It was about this point that I was having a damn good nose around the market, being shown around the local housing stock - my old flat was on the market for £124k in an EA down the road. When I checked the house price websites it came up as bought for £69k a few years ago.

The thing is though, it's been completely empty ever since I moved out. I've now moved out of the 2nd flat, which turned out to be cold, damp and noisy, and got a much bigger rented house a few streets away for only a little more rent.

As for the old flat, it's either:
1) Still not sold - there are a bunch of for-sale signs up, not sure which flats they refer to
2) It has been sold to BTL and no-one has rented it since
3) It has been sold to someone who's actually going to live there themselves - but where are they after 6 months??

Makes you wonder...

Try SE london - 45 mins to oxford circus, you can get a 3 bed for that amount in a decent location (Crystal Palace, Forest Hill) with decent parks that aren't full of nannies barking into their mobiles. Brixton is highly over-rated, but then people get scared when they aren't on the tube...

Truthfully I'd rather stay in Hampton Wick (Kingston Upon Thames) but I need to share as renting 1-bed would be a waste of money and I can't get anyone to move 'out' to Hampton Wick. Chiswick has very easy direct links to central London, District line isn't that bad (big carriages) and can get a seat from Chiswick Park. Good links out of London on the roads to M4 or M3. Very cosmopolitan vibe on the Chiswick High Road.

All of the reasons you quote for moving to Chiswick are certainly valid if you were buying. Hence why buying prices are higher there than the surrounding areas. But I still wouldn't advocate renting there.

I know Chiswick very well - I live there.

Chiswick floods regularly at high tide - I've seen some excellent pix of canoeists in a Chiswick garage in a metre of water, and another of a swan in someone's front-door area.

I used to live in Putney and one of the entertainments was wandering down to the river when it flooded to see the inevitable furious owner of a sports car or chelsea tractor wading out to their slightly-reduced-in-value car.

Sorry, that made me snigger. It just sounds slightly obscene

I pay over £1,000 a month for a 1 bed flat not too far from Chiswick, so if you can pick up a 2 bed for that you're doing well.

Granted where I live has much better transport links that Chiswick. I assume that for that price if is probably some distance from Chiswick High Road?

Better than a crab in your back passage

Not to be nosey.

But how much do you guys typically earn a year inc bonus, london waiting etc to be able to afford £1000 pm rent?

I would find it hard to pay £400 or £500 rent.

I rent with my wife, so I guess my share is just over £500/month....or not!

The vast majority of 1 bed flats in West London are rented by couples. Singles tend to rent studios as you need to be earning serious money to justify paying that alone.

Average salary in City of London and Tower Hamlets (the borough containing Canary Wharf) is about £65,000. I'd use that as your starting point, and remember that it includes the cleaners as well as the bankers.

Remember that's just the people living in those boroughs, NOT all the people working there.

No, it's people working there. They live all over the place, of course.

Where do you get these facts? Have you got any links as I find it very hard to believe that the average of all workers in London City and Tower Hamlets is £65k, even given the massive salaries of the investment bankers.

http://www.gle.co.uk/onelondon/GVine/Grape...iting4Nov04.htm

Statistics and damn lies !

Yes the Average maybe £65k but they dont all work and LIVE in docklands !

I'd slum it for half that, does canary Wharf need Engineers cause I.d live in a ditch and retire to Argentina in a year!

10 mins from Chiswick Park tube.

This doesn't make any sense. Why should the reasons for wanting to live somewhere be any different if you are renting?

I don't believe that, 3 years ago I remember reading in the Canary Wharf free paper that the average wage for Canary Wharf employees was £40K. This you would expect to be higher than the average for City of London and Tower Hamlets and I wouldn't think it has gone up so much in the last 3 years.

Strewth, the average has increased by about 75% in the last 3/4 years. Probably the big banks moving in. It really is time for a pay rise - I work in both Canary Wharf and the City!

I work in both Canary Wharf and the City!

Well you can only have the one pay rise !

Update

Landlord called back tonight to say that offer of £1000 was too low and that they had another offer but would take £1125 (the lowest they could accept to cover mortgage). I declined saying that the property was only worth £1000 to me as could get better location etc. The landlord said that this wouldn't be enough to cover the mortgage and they will be struggling and that if interest rates rise any further they will have to sell! Not very professional stuff to divulge and displaying their true amateur BTL status. Then they said what about £1100 so I realised the 'other offer' can't have been much more than my offer and that they really are quite desperate

Just some evidence from the BTL coal face, rent rises dogbox - I don't think so!

It's funny to hear about the mentality of London folk. Why the hell anyone would live and work in London I don't know...Why don't you get out of that shithole - don't get me wrong...London is a fantastic place to visit but to live there, well it's bordering on sado-masochism...Don't care how much anyone says "well it's the only place I can earn the money I think I deserve" Bullox....London folk are seriously F***ed up....

Charming!

London doesn't HAVE to be expensive if you don't want it to be. See the Frugalista's field manual thread! Most Londoners seem to hate their jobs but at the same time want to live as close to work as possible!

"Most Londoners seem to hate their jobs"

they are TIED to their little jobs...mentally and financially. Sorry to be so vulgar and repeat my previous phrase but people who work in London because ' it's the only place where my graduate degree commands the earnings it so obviously deserves' well, they are totally braindead and f***ed up.

"Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be." Jane Austen

The reason I wouldn't (and didn't) rent in Chiswick is that it's far more expensive than the surrounding areas. I rented in perfectly acceptable areas of Ealing and Hanwell whilst saving for the deposit. Every £100 saved in rent is another £100 off the eventual mortgage.

Have you looked at how much you save over the lifetime of a mortgage if the original loan is £10,000 lower.

To put Chiswick into perspective. I went shopping on the high road on Saturday and saw Vanessa Redgrave (in a hairdresser) and Imogen Stubbs, Trevor Nunn and their son. It's a very nice place to live, but not if you're subsidising somebody else's mortgage.

I love London and I like my job.

I don't know where you live, but if I did I wouldn't rubbish it or you. Please show us the same courtesy.

Don't worry about the turnip licking country bumpkin with no idea of real life in the fast lane. When he visits he probably finds it hard to fit his tractor down our tree-lined boulevards.

All those places like Chiswick, Richmond and Kingston are overpriced tosh (IMHO ) and most of them (especially Kingston) are full of binge drinking chavs on a weekend and annoying pretentious twats in Toyota Land Crushers.

I'm paying £1100 a month for a 3 bed house in Balham, right next to Tooting Bec common. 20 minutes on the tube to West End and City and its the northern line not the shitty district line. 20 minute walk to Clapham Common. Loads of half decent bars and a very nice demographic mix of people. 5 minutes overland train to Clapham Junction from which you can get to almost anywhere.

The Northern line is possibly the worst line in London. How is it shitty compared to the District line? District line carriages are almost twice as large, people are never rammed on like on the Northern line and the air quality is far better - Northern line is a very deep tube with air quality that doesn't even meet saftety standards.

Rent price is good though

Use the tube??

Have some style and use black cabs.

A mere £35 to get home from the theatre - bargain!

Oh yea I agree its the worst in terms of being rammed in like cattle it is by far the best line for getting places and frequency though. When I think of the tube I consider utility not comfort!

Northern Line is also (marginally) faster than District, e.g. Wimbledon to Embankment 32 mins on District, South Wimbledon to Embankment 26 minutes

Charming but true. Most Londoners think the UK begins and ends in a city with as many squalid dumps as beatiful parks.

There are 2 Londons - one full of people who work in PR, Advertising, Law, the Meejah etc - and the other full of people earning bugger all trying to scrape by in one of the world's most expensive cities.

Live in London? Only if I was stinking rich and could afford a house in a nice place and a place in the country. But live in Hayes, or Harrow, or Stepney, or Bethnall Green, or Harlesden. No thanks.

That's rubbish - there are a number of very nice places to live in and around the London area. Typical non-Londoner prejudice.

The squalor and the 2 Londons DOES apply to the inner bits especially places like Islington where family people especially are either stinking rich or immigrants living in council flats............but when you get 15 to 20 miles away from central London income distribution and the lack of squalor is like the rest of the UK.......

I was born in Hayes (typical FTB property 1 bed maisonnette), brought up in Harrow (typical next step 3 bed semi) and resolved that I would never live in such a godforsaken hole again.

It was the main driver in being able to afford to live in a better part of London.

I decided that I would not compromise. Either earn enough to live comfortably in a decent bit of London or move out altogether.

Blimey, didn't know fronting the anarcho-punk band Crass paid that well....

1) We sold the commune to property developers.
2) I made sure from the early days that I only employed the best lawyers
3) Everytime someone used our logo they had to pay royalties
4) Honey Bane was sent out onto the game - she owed us.
5) None of the above - I'm a fat balding meedja tart

About 70% of London is a cakehole.

All with the eyes on making a fast buck, do these people honestly think they are going to make half a million in ten years? Because thats what it would have to be to be worth it.

No they are not...

I wanted to ask that!

I take home roughly £1000/month ... and the amount many pay for rent makes me wonder where they get the money from. Certainly nobody I know could afford that.

The Internet has really opened my eyes to a whole new sort of people/lives I never knew existed.