I BOUGHT OUR LONDON HOME FOR £390K IN 2018 – SIX YEARS LATER, IT SOLD FOR THE SAME PRICE

Kez Duxbury paid £390,000 for his first home, a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a new-build development in Upton Park, London, in 2018.

“I was lucky enough to receive an inheritance of £20,000, which worked out as a 5 per cent deposit,” he said. “I also used the Help To Buy equity loan scheme.”

Now 31, Kez lived there with his wife, and the couple welcomed a son in 2020.

The leasehold flat had a B1 form, which shows the fire risk of the building’s cladding is low, and no remedial work is required.

So, while there was cladding, it was mortgageable, and the service charge was £360 a month. On the face of it, his leasehold flat had no major issues, but when they came to sell in 2024, it took 11 months – and the couple had to accept an offer at the same price as they’d paid for it six years earlier.

Across London, Kez’s experience is not an isolated one. According to Hamptons Research, between 2016 and 2023, flats in the capital increased by 3 per cent; in comparison, terrace houses were up 18 per cent.

Zoopla paints an even more depressing picture, finding London flat values stagnant over the same period, representing a 24 per cent decline in real terms.

Across the UK, between 2020 and 2025, the value of flats increased by just 7 per cent, compared to 24 per cent for houses.

While prices have picked up slowly in the last couple of years, for many, like Kez, it’s too late.

“It really felt like we were bent over a barrel. We were in that flat for six years and we thought we were doing everything to get ahead – we’d done what our parents had done. I felt, by the end of it, we’d been burnt by a process that had worked for our parents.”

Leasehold vs freehold

Freehold: Freehold means to own a property, including the land it is built on, with no fixed time limit.

If you buy a freehold, you’re responsible for maintaining your property and land. You should budget for these costs.

Most houses are freehold.

Leasehold: Leasehold means to own a property for a fixed amount of time, leasing it from a landlord who owns the whole building or land it is built on.

Usually, your lease will be between 90 and 999 years. The length of your lease will be in your lease agreement with the freeholder.

Most flats and maisonettes are leaseholds. This means that while you own your property within the building, you don’t own any part of the building it’s in. And you might need to pay monthly or yearly maintenance charges.

The flat initially went on the market in August 2023 with Foxtons, who valued it at £475,000. “It sat on there with them, and we didn’t have any viewings,” he said. “The estate agent we were dealing with got sacked as he was overpromising clients.”

The family weren’t the only ones who struggled to sell. Kez says there was one property nearby that had been bought for £350,000 and sold for £320,000 on the open market. “That was the first time I got a bit worried.”

After six months, the couple switched to a Canary Wharf agent, but found “the market had changed” since 2018.

“At that time nothing was safer than bricks and mortar, but we weren’t expecting a global pandemic. People didn’t need to live in Zone 2/3 if they weren’t working there five days a week. Because of Covid, other areas went up and increased, but Canary Wharf areas didn’t, as there wasn’t the market there.

“What we were expecting was a constant flow of people into London and that wasn’t happening anymore.”

Covid also slowed the planned gentrification that had been expected of the Upton Park area, and when West Ham moved their football stadium, it lost some of its vibrancy, with cafes and restaurants being replaced by betting shops.

“Covid has stuffed how my generation thinks about property. People who were in London during Covid wouldn’t buy there ever again. Our plan had been to stay the five years during the interest-free period [of the Help to Buy loan] and then when we were 30, 31, it would give us some flexibility to decide what to do. But because of Covid, this didn’t happen.”

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Kez, the financial lead at Press Box PR, still had a mortgage with a low interest rate, but those looking around his flat were also having to contend with more expensive levels of borrowing.

“There’s been historic blindness; everyone thought low interest rates were going to be around forever and we got complacent with debt being so cheap.”

When they received an offer, it was for £350,000, £40,000 below what they’d paid.

“With the Help to Buy equity loan, if the price of your home goes down, you need to pay the difference, and we weren’t in a position to do that.”

Eventually, in July last year, they found another buyer, who offered them what they paid, and the family moved to Cambridgeshire, where Kez now has a two-hour commute. They bought a four-bedroom terrace house, paying £434,000, and getting some cash incentives from the builder.

While this home is also a new-build, Kez made sure it was freehold to avoid paying any expensive service charges.

“My wife is happier in new builds as she likes the 10-year guarantee. [Our experience in London] didn’t put us off new builds because it’s our forever home and I’d be surprised if we moved in the next 20 years. We’ve come to a place where they are developing a new town and that takes time, and we’ve bought into that.”

2025-06-10T05:22:31Z