According to the High Street lender, Halifax, the quality of homes across the UK has improved over the past few decades but affordability is now lower than it was fifty years ago.
Over the past five decades house prices have risen by around 2.7 percent a year taking inflation into account, according to the lender. However, over the same period annual earnings have gone up by just 2 percent a year, so the increases on house prices have outweighed the increases in wages.
The past ten years have seen the house price increases gain momentum. The study that was carried out by the Halifax looked at house prices on UK properties between 1959 and 2009. One economist from the Halifax said that there had been some remarkable changes in the property market and with property prices over the past fifty years. The figures also showed that owner occupation soared during the 1980s, and whilst in 1961 only 43 percent of homes were owned this had increased to 68 percent by 2008.
Over the same period privately rented homes fell from 33 percent to just 14 percent, although officials claim that an increase in student numbers have seen the number increase slightly over the past twenty years. The research found that there had been four periods where major house price increases had occurred over the past five decades, and these were 1971-1973, 1977-80, 1985-89, and 1998-2007.
Greater London is said to have seen the biggest increases in house prices in the last fifty years according to the research, with the smallest increases being seen in Scotland. In real terms the average property price has increased by around 273 percent between 1959 and 2009 with a typical home costing around £43,000 in 1959 in today’s money.