We had an interesting comparison last night, when we watched this weeks Relocation, Relocation which we had recorded on Wednesday, and last nights Money Programme, called Dream Commuters.

Relocation, Relocation this week was about Vikki and James who were looking for the dream location of a four bedroom semi-rural property in the Thames Valley that was commutable to London – basically the area around where we live. They had a budget of £380,000 – and as anyone who lives around here will tell you, that isn’t enough – in fact nowhere near. Needless to say, Phil and Kirsty, the presenters struggled to find anything to show them. In the end it was a combination of within budget properties that didn’t meet the spec, or within spec properties that were over budget. Ultimately the buyers compromised and bought a three bedroom semi-detached house, in the village of Woodcote in Oxfordshire, ticking the semi-rural and transport boxes, but not the rest.

The Money Programme on Dream Commuters was also locally based, with two of the three examples of long distance commuters working for eMapSite whose office is about a mile away on the corner of the Reading Road just by the bridge over the Blackwater into Hampshire. Both the CTO Justin Saunders, and one of his developers John Powell live outside the UK, Justin in rural South-West France and John in Barcelona. The programme showed Justin making his Friday night commute home on the EasyJet flight from Gatwick to Toulouse, on which the presenter got the cabin crew to ask the passengers to raise their hands if they were regular commuters on the route – to which about half the plane it seemed put up their hands. Since by buying his tickets well in advance Justin said that they are only costing £38, you can understand the attraction. When alongside that he also revealed that having sold their two bedroom cottage in Surrey for £285,000 they had bought their current £180,000 property – a five bedroom riverside house with swimming pool and separate cottage that was about the same size as their old UK house, you can understand why the move is so appealing. Thanks to the benefits of high-speed internet, both men were still able to access their company computers back in the UK.

The possibility of moves out of the Thames Valley can also work in the UK, for example one of our development team at work is currently in the process of moving up to Cambridgeshire, where he can get a much larger house in a semi-rural location to replace his town centre property in Bracknell. Thanks to the village he is moving to having high speed internet, he can remotely connect to the company network, and work just as well from Cambridgeshire as he does from Wokingham.

The stories of stretched budgets, and people moving away to get a better standard of living ring true with many people living around here. Taking a look at the Priced Out campaign pages you can see quite how much in real terms people have been affected. The site includes a calculator to allow you to work out whether you’d be able to afford your first house today, which uses trends to work out what the equivalent salary and house prices would be today. The site also tries to explode the myth that rising house prices are good if you are a house owner, and that houses are somehow more affordable now – something that TV presenters like Phil and Kirsty are often accused of implying.

The site highlights that homes are not more affordable today – mortgages are thanks to historically low interest rates – something that could change if rates continue to rise. It also highlights that the only people who benefit from high house prices are the people who can realise the growth of the investment, so investment buyers and people who are trading down in house size. Everybody else, who when they move is wanting to move somewhere bigger, has a more difficult time as the growth in the market stretches the rungs in the property ladder, making just as difficult for those already on the ladder to afford to make the step up – just the issue myself and Beth found recently. For more information on house prices today, take a look at the graphs on the HousePriceCrash website (no prizes for guessing what they think is going to happen) especially take a look at this graph of house prices against earnings since 1953 to see the extent of the problem.