Sell NOW, move to country, bank £520k AND pay off two kids school fees

Savills' excellent research has shown, clearly, that the gap between the values of houses in London and those in the Country are the widest they’ve been for a long time.

 If you’re lucky enough to be living in a typical prime SW London house worth c. £1.325m and you moved to the country now, you’d be saving a massive £520k rather than the £190k it would have been five years ago. This is a huge difference, you’d be better off by £330,000, and in percentage terms the savings are even greater for lower value houses.

 This is extraordinary. D&G has for years been a preferred exit strategy of choice for those seeking the good life in the country. People started off buying a small one bed flat in Balham, moved to a two bed flat in Clapham, aspired to a 4 bed house between the commons and then, possibly via a bigger house in Putney, off to the country. The Tax office buggering around with Stamp Duty has shortened that sequence, but overall it’s still what people aspire to.

 So given what’s happening to relative values why aren’t more people taking advantage. Any one of our managers will clearly tell you that if you put your house on now, provided it ticks the right boxes, you’ll be knocked over in the rush. You can then take a leisurely look around in the country and still bank enough money to pay two kids’ school fees.

 I’ve tried to explain away the lack of sellers by conjecturing that people have got used to the unreal paradigm we now live in, and look like living in for a few more years yet, and that simple inertia is preventing anyone bothering to move. Are people really staying put simply because they can afford their stupidly cheap mortgages when the flip side is there’s a real chance of achieving the dream of a move to your forever house in the country AND paying off your school fees.

 For card carrying members of the middle class surely it doesn’t come better than this, so why aren’t more of you doing it?