Average house price 70 years ago ‘was around £56,000 in today’s money’

The average UK house price was around £56,000 70 years ago in today’s money, according to analysis carried out to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

Estate agent Savills said the typical house price in early 1952 was just under £2,000 – equating to around £56,000 when taking inflation into account.

The average house price nowadays is more than four times this sum – at £260,000.

Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills said: “House price growth over the past 70 years has meant that the nation’s housing stock has become a vast source and store of household wealth during the Queen’s reign.

“But the ability to benefit from this has largely been dependent on the year you were born, meaning the capital appreciation we have seen through different housing market cycles has created a marked divide between the housing ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.”

Mr Cook added that house price upswings “have been magnified by a systemic undersupply of housing over the past 40 years”.

Savills said the start of the Queen’s reign coincided with a major national housebuilding programme.

Following economic volatility in the 1970s, there was some strong house price growth in the 1980s under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme.

Mr Cook said: “This period fundamentally altered the way in which we looked at our home as a route to financial prosperity, fuelling the nation’s obsession with house prices.”

Savills said a longer period of rising property prices took place between 1995 and 2007.

During this time the average multiple of their income that people borrowed increased from 2.3 times their income to 3.1 times.

Mr Cook said a “sizeable wedge” was created between those who were and were not able to get onto the housing ladder.

Looking at today’s market, he said: “With a strong employment market, mortgage regulation having stress tested borrowers’ ability to sustain rate rises, and many having already locked into historically low interest rates, there don’t appear to be the triggers that have fuelled previous market downturns.”