The failure to get on the property ladder used to be the modern-day bogeyman for young adults. It was used as a constant reminder for young adults to be good. Save money, stop eating avocados and drinking takeaway coffees so that they could someday climb the highly aspirational property ladder. God forbid you’re stuck renting for the rest of your life.
That being said, today is the ‘cost of rent day’ for everyone renting in London. Renters in London, up until today, have spent the first 152 days of the year earning nothing but their rent. And this number increases year on year. So, again, save as much as you can and buy.
But if this generation ever had hopes of getting on the property ladder, they were sorely misguided. The fear factor was once that the ladder was hard to get on. Nobody said it would disappear altogether. The myth that you could scrape together a deposit in your twenties, buy somewhere small, let it build up equity as prices rise and then trade up, that each rung funded the next, has been debunked. It was how your parents did it and their parents before them.
Nobody mentioned the possibility that the ladder would simply vanish or that you’d spend a third of the year’s wages waiting at the bottom for a rung that never appears. That model relied on two things: a supply of affordable houses and prices that reliably went up after they bought them. Neither can be taken for granted any more.
