Days of multiple moves are numbered

Kirsty Mcluckie on the changes in home ownership

ow many homes will you own in your life? I’m on number four and my progression through the housing market, for my age – 50 next year – is probably fairly typical.

Co-incidentally, the first flat my husband and I bought after we got married in 1995 is pictured in this week’s piece about guesthouses, next to the Stirling B&B, Woodside.

We bought the onebedroomed top floor flat at 2 Back Walk, and were thrilled to move into it from a rented cottage.

When we started a family three years later, we moved to a terraced two-bedroomed house and then a larger detached property, both in the same village, before settling into our current home ten years ago.

We are likely to stay here until the dread feelings of empty nest syndrome, retirement, or the arrival of grandchildren elsewhere in the UK some time in the distant future, prompts a relocation and a downsize.

From speaking to Scottish property owners every week, I know that this is a common journey for those of my generation and above, but perhaps we are just a statistic in a pattern of behaviour that is changing dramatically.

In the first half of the last century, one home owned for a lifetime was the norm.

Saved for, perhaps for years, and bought by a couple to move into on their marriage, the house would be expected to cope with however many children came along, even if it were a bit of a squeeze, and it would probably be owned and lived in until the couple’s death.

That started to change in the aspirational 1950s and 1960s and the average number of properties owned in a lifetime for the over 50s is now 3.2, according to figures by LV= home insurance.

This will include a significant number who have owned many more than the average.

Certainly by the 1980s and 1990s, I had savvy friends who were buying and selling their homes every couple of years, building equity each time.

It isn’t unusual among those who had the wherewithal, and the patience to put up with moving, to have had a double digit number of addresses within a decade or so. But times change. The LV= figures also predict that Britons now in their 20s and 30s will own half as many homes in their lifetime as their parents, an average of 1.7 per buyer.

The predictions certainly ring true in my experience.

None of my nephews and nieces, now entering their 30s and settling down to careers and relationships, own their own property yet, and for those based in the south east of England, they aren’t likely to soon.

The type of property they would want is also changing.

The average age of a first-time buyer has reached 30 across the UK, at which stage in life a one-bedroomed city shoebox flat is unlikely to suit personal circumstances.

Nor are that generation ever likely to feel that buying a property on a whim, only to sell a couple of years later, is going to be cost effective, without dramatic rises in house prices in the short term to finance the next deposit and cover moving costs.

And it is not easy for single people to afford a property on their own.

Perhaps we are heading back to the days when the start of a relationship heralded the purchase of a first property, with the expectation that you are going to live in it, for life.