> As the tech workers land the big salaries, home prices are skyrocketing, and the locals are being squeezed out.
Joke is on them, I'm a new tech immigrant to Cambridge and I still can't buy a house here.
Joke is on them, I'm a new tech immigrant to Cambridge and I still can't buy a house here.
4 x my salary would get me a 2 bed flat if i didn't mind living in a ghetto.
On the other hand, buying in conjunction with the local housing associations is more feasible, so it's not all doom and gloom.
We sold to a family with young kids who wanted to live there - which I preferred.
But seriously, if you want to know what the housing market in Cambridge is driven by, look at the new things they're building. The "affordable" housing is far beyond anyone doing a "normal" job who just wants to live locally, say a school teacher or a nurse at one of the hospitals. Even those of us lucky enough to work in the relatively well-paid tech sector mostly couldn't afford one of the new luxury flats or town houses that keep springing up near the railway station, some of which have seven-figure asking prices.
For those reading this in the US who might be used to SV wages in tech, earning enough over here to get a seven figure place almost certainly means that either you had a very successful exit already or you have an unusually well-paid gig probably down in London. No-one on anything close to normal salary or freelance rates in tech sectors can get that kind of mortgage, so otherwise if you didn't already own a place that you can trade up from, you're totally locked out of that high-end market. And yet people keep building whole estates of properties like that, and then trickling them onto the market over the next year or two to keep the prices high.
I find it quite depressing that having been entrepreneurial and even modestly successful by any normal standard, we would probably still have made more money if we'd just invested in buy-to-let property in Cambridge instead of starting our first business and then reinvested in growing the property portfolio since. The UK housing market (and our incentives for taking a risk and starting out on your own in business) are messed up.