Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Average Monthly Rent in Europe http://i.imgur.com/RKfucgp.gif

Average % Income Spent on Rent in Europe http://i.imgur.com/himm8Ur.gif

The reason the UK is so high is because London literally drags the whole country up to the top of the ranking (not necessarily good) - Ireland would have vaguely similar rents to the UK discounting London and these two images help show that London is a bit rent mad.

View on HN

Whilst London is quite apart from the rest of the UK. It isn't the only place in the UK with disproprtionately high rents. Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, anywhere with a bouyant jobs market you pay over the odds for compared to Europe.

Granted not as high as London, but as a % of income not dissimilar at the end of the month.

If you compare local earnings to house prices, London is, in fact is only #2, behind Oxford.[1] The problem with Oxford and Cambridge (as well as a place like Reading) is that they are still within commutable distance from London (Oxford and Reading slightly more so than Cambridge), which means you get people who earn well even for London standards who live in those cities and commute, in turn making those places more expensive. Some of the other cities, like Edinburgh, Manchester (in parts) and Aberdeen (oil) are certainly pricey as well, but they are not nearly as expensive as the South of England.

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/house-prices/114...

Oxford is indeed pretty bad. I have to live ~20 miles from the centre, and even then it's not cheap.

Ireland has large variances in its rent as well. Dublin is substantially higher than the rest of the country. London is just beyond this normal deviation though. The rent between Oxford and Dublin for instance would be very comparable.

> Ireland would have vaguely similar rents to the UK discounting London

At first, this seemed wildly implausible. But back of the envelope, it requires house prices to be about 3x higher in London (15% of the UK) than elsewhere. That seems a little high to me, but the right sort of ballpark.

(Calculation: start with 100 houses at 679pcm. Increase 15 of them in price until the average is 902pcm. Those 15 houses now cost 2165pcm.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com