House prices soar above the national average

Riverside Close beside the River Lea pic: Flickr- Bunch & Duke

Hackney housing is the fifth most expensive in the country as the price of a home in the borough soars to over double the national average, research has found.

Figures released by bank and mortgage broker Halifax show that homes in Hackney cost on average 6.78 times the yearly wage, with not a single London borough deemed ‘affordable’.

They came as London’s housing market defied a nationwide slump to leap 5.5% this year despite the recession.

The BBC claimed the average cost of a home in Hackney this year was £371,187, making it the most expensive of the four EastLondonLines boroughs.  Figures released by the Nationwide building society this week placed the national average at £163,822.

The cheapest borough was Croydon, where the average home would set you back £258,211.

Nine of the ten least affordable regions were in London, Halifax said, naming Brent as the worst at an average house price of 9.11 times the yearly wage. In contrast, houses in South Ayrshire, Scotland, are the UK’s most affordable at just over double (2.65 times) annual earnings.

An affordable home is defined as one which costs less than four times gross annual earnings.

A project at Hertford Road designed to deliver cheap housing was shelved last summer among many others put on hold in the face of budget cuts.

On a national level, the highest proportion of first homes deemed ‘affordable’ since 2003 was coupled with the lowest number of first-time buyers since 1974.

Halifax blamed higher average deposits, which have gone from 10 per cent of the property purchase in 2007 to twenty per cent in 2011 at an average of £27,032. For first-time buyers in London, the average deposit is a quarter of the average property value at £60,193.

2 Comments

  1. ben January 2, 2012
  2. Gene Bastura March 29, 2012

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