Following the Times’ list of the best places to live in the UK, we speak to Zoopla’s Executive Director, Richard Connell, about what makes a place desirable for house buyers.
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00:00A lot of the places that come at the top of these best places to live, they are accessible
00:04to kind of major employment centers, you know, whether that's close to Edinburgh, whether
00:10it goes to sort of York or Manchester, accessible to London, Bristol, Bath, those sort of markets
00:17basically.
00:18Obviously, we're in more difficult times at the moment.
00:20Has that affected sort of the way people look at housing?
00:23Absolutely.
00:24I mean, eight in 10 people buying a property use a mortgage.
00:28So what you can afford with a mortgage, what mortgage rates are, you know, it's particularly
00:34acute for first time buyers who need to typically put down quite a large deposit now, averaging
00:40around about 20% of the value of the property, you know, used to be close to 5% 30 or 40
00:45years ago.
00:46So affordability matters to first time buyers, it matters to upsizers.
00:49Things like green spaces, nice places to visit and cultural things, are they very important
00:54to home buyers?
00:55Yeah, absolutely.
00:57I think it's the overall, I think what people focus on the most is their home.
01:01What's the immediate environment?
01:03What do I want on my kind of local area?
01:06And then I think what really makes places jump up the rankings is it's got a, you know,
01:09a great stock of housing.
01:12It's got all the right kind of facilities, local services, etc, the accessibility.
01:17And then what really makes people jump to the top of the ranking then is all these other
01:20things basically, it's the parks, it's the, you know, with lots of people walking dogs
01:25and things, or, you know, just it's that sort of the extra things that people want
01:29as part of a, of a sort of the full experience of living in a location, basically.
01:35Looking ahead then, are there any areas that you're aware of up and coming areas that you
01:40could maybe sort of trends moving towards best places to live list?
01:45Anywhere that's lower down on the list now that you feel like an area or a region that
01:48might sort of have a bit of a boost on that list next year?
01:53I think the, I think it's all about affordability.
01:55I think a lot of these places on this list are reasonably expensive.
01:58They're the sort of asset-rich places.
02:01I think the more active housing markets or the ones that are going to do well are those
02:05offer great value for money and almost these places of tomorrow, value for money, but offering
02:10elements of these places, so accessible, affordable.
02:14I think, yeah, that the real housing market is really being shaped by affordability and
02:17access to housing with higher mortgage rates, higher house prices.
02:22So that's going to be the key factor, I think, that shapes tomorrow's list of emerging markets
02:27and areas where people want to move to live.