Back in 1971 my parents purchased their own house and paid £11,000. In that year the Prime Minister’s salary was £14,000.
In September last year, as executor trustee of my late mother’s estate, I sold that same house. As the Prime Minister’s salary is now 10 times what it was in 1971, in theory I should have sold my parents’ house for £110,000.
I sold it for half a million.
In 1974 I purchased my first house (a worker’s cottage) for £10,000. In three years the value had risen to £40,000. The reason for this massive jump is that building societies started to give 100 per cent mortgages.
The requirement to save a substantial deposit kept prices down, removing it caused demand to exceed supply.
The following decade, under the…