Is London now only for the inheritocracy?

With deposit amounts reaching record highs, only the wealthy can afford to buy in London - and it's creating a brain drain as more talented people are forced out of the capital, says Alexandra Jones

- Alexandra Jones

UNLESS your parents can give you money for a deposit, it feels like it doesn't matter how much U you earn, you're basically priced out of London," says 31-year-old art director Chloe Sharp. In 2021 she moved out of London, to Cambridge, where she now lives.

Before the move she had spent a happy decade renting in the capital and assumed the city would be her home forever; she and her partner, a geography teacher, had even briefly considered buying in Walthamstow, but then fell pregnant. "It was quite soul-destroying to sit down with a broker and work out what we could afford," she says. Despite years of putting money aside, they had nowhere near enough deposit saved for a place that would be big enough for them plus a baby. "I just felt defeated," she says. "It made me wonder, like, 'who is this city even for?' I was earning more money than at any other point in my career and my partner was doing really well too. We'd been sensible with savings, I thought we were pretty well off. It's crazy, what this housing market has become. It feels like the only way you can settle in London is if you come from wealth."

It's a story that's all too familiar in a city where the average property price is now £667,600 and where, last year, the average first-time buyer had a deposit of just under £150,000. As Sharp found, saving that amount amid record-high rental prices and now a cost-of-living crisis is a close to impossible task for even those who are on above-average salaries - which is why more than half of all first-time buyers in 2022 were forced to rely on their parents to fund their purchase.