Buying in London

brett — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:17:40 +0000

We are keen to buy a flat in London. It's amazing how expensive the places over here are though! It's quite depressing the compromises that we are forced to make. The cheapest place in Covent Garden we could buy is listed at £300,000 for a 24 square meter studio.

I figure we have two main strategies:

Buy a tiny place in a great area. Live like cockroaches for a few years and pay it down. Rent out the place to short-term let people at an exorbitant price.
Buy a larger place in a suburb further out from zone one. Live a slightly less urban life for a few years. Rent out the place to longer-term tenants.

Needless to say, my money's on option 1! I figure we can grab a shoebox in a great area - I'd love to say Soho or Covent Garden, but even the shoeboxes in those locations tend to run to a minimum of £400k. OK, so we're looking at a smallish pad in Angel or Regents Park... the thing is; in London if you live in an OK 'burb in Zone 1, you can spend most of your time out of the flat because there's plenty to do in the local area. We rent a separate office for the company, so we have somewhere to go and sit and work during the day. I definitely want to practice the Hi-Tech Nomad lifestyle, which is out-and-about rather than stuck in suburbia.

Brett Hutley's Blog » Urban Living

Buying in London