How affordable are Teddington properties?

I had an interesting chat with a guy who lives in Hampton Hill last week. He is thinking of buying his first buy to let property and he wanted my opinion on the state of the Teddington property market and if it was a good time to invest.

He was particularly worried that with all the newspaper headlines of a booming housing market, there wouldn’t be any demand by tenants. One of the best pieces of advice I can give to those looking to invest in property is a simple trick of the trade. You can judge the affordability of an area’s property market (and thus how much demand there could be) by simply finding the ratio of the average property price to the average salary. The lower the ratio, the more affordable property is.

When we put this to the test, we found that an average property in Teddington currently has an average property value of around £517,400 with the average salary being £41,808. This is a ratio of 1 to 12.4, which is quite a bit higher than the UK National average of 1 to 9.46. So you can see how this makes buying out of reach for the majority of people in Teddington with first time buyers being well and truly priced out of the market. The issue isn’t just the affordability, it’s also the raising of the 10% deposit, which, when you take into account fees, will be in the order of a whopping £69k!!

Tenant’s inability to raise that sort of money for the deposit is driving demand for rental property and will continue to do so for a long time yet.

Rebecca Smith