I'm butting up against Poe's Law on this one. Is it a joke, or peak HN?
Also, housing in much of the US is criminally expensive, and some people have unreasonably snobby attitudes about what constitutes a “decent area” in the US. Or maybe he was just making an understated and backhanded joke about the London housing market, which I’ve heard to be similarly absurd.
No matter how absurd it is, Ive never heard of a 6k per month mortgage, that is absolutely insane.
I live in NYC, on the UWS, in a nice (but not extravagant) 2 bedroom apartment. It’s about 1000 sq feet, and I pay $5k per month in rent. Buying a similar place in my neighborhood would cost me literally double that per month, after putting down $300k or more. My neighborhood has hundreds of thousands of people in it, all paying similar amounts (or much much more). My building has about 60 units, and I live in one of the smaller ones. Almost half of the units rent for $12k-15k per month. This is just one of hundreds of buildings in my neighborhood alone, one of thousands in Manhattan.
Of the ~350 apartments with at least 3 bedrooms for sale right in my neighborhood, only 77 cost less than $3mm. There are 52 for sale for more than $10mm, and those will almost all sell.
The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million
I have a feeling that data is wrong. If it's accurate it's definitely been pushed up by huge outliers on the top end (like £50+M properties in Chelsea and west ken that are zone 2)
I think the median zone 2 terraced house is more like £1m, can't find a statistic but I just bought a £1.5m house in hackney and there were 10 £1-1.3m properties for every £1.7m+
Still, a £1.3m house isn't completely infeasible in London :-).