50-year decline in housing affordability
The BBC website has a summary of the key points in a report issued by the Halifax about the housing market over the last 50 years. The main headline is that houses have become less affordable, with the average annual price rise of 2.7% outstripping the 2% annual rise in incomes over the period. There have been 4 periods of boom in house prices: 1971-73, 1977-80, 1985-89, and 1998-2007, with the greatest acceleration in the last decade. In 1959 the average house cost £2,507 (compared with an average price in December 2009 of £162,103 according to Nationwide Building Society) and about 14% of them did not have an indoor toilet (compared with 0.2% in 1996). In 1967 22% of houses did not have a basic hot water supply, and built-in central heating was a rare facility.
