Cost of London Property the Highest in Europe

This is nothing knew, everyone knew this. However maybe you weren't aware by just how much!


The average cost of an apartment in London is now at a staggering £1,188,240. That is only for a 120 square foot apartment too. This provides and average price per square foot of £9,902.

The second highest prices in Europe, Paris, has a price per square foot of £6,947. The remaining capitals of Europe have prices at less than half of Europe at less than £4000 per square foot.


However this super high cost of living is resulting in low standards of living in the UK despite higher earnings. This has left the UK at the bottom of the standard of living list placing only above Ireland!

Live Simply Traffic up again!

Live Simply traffic is steadily growing. The summer tends to be a much busier time for rentals than the winter months, however due to the credit crunch we were expecting much lower traffic levels. Of course traffic levels do not indicate whether or not these "browsers" are taking properties or just watching the market.

Up until this point rental prices have been holding out strong with people preferring to stay put than gamble on buying. However as the credit crunch carries on inevitably in the long term rental prices will follow the sales prices. The question is when and by how much.

Potentially this recent traffic surge could be the first glimpse of the bargain hunters coming out to see what's on offer with the falling rental prices. Alternatively this traffic surge could be due to the necessity of rental property regardless of market conditions. After all there is still a huge shortage of homes in London.

So this means that any short term falls in property and rental prices unless held down by a massive expansion in availability of homes will inevitably rise back to pre crunch levels sooner or later.

Falling Property Prices

Britain has experienced its biggest and longest period of growth in the housing market however this is almost certainly about to change. Comparisons are being drawn with the early 1990's when the property prices flopped and this brought about a significant recession.

Activity in the services sector is now said to be at its lowest since October 2001. The UK economy now looks extremely vulnerable to falling housing wealth due to the collapse in mortgage finance, which in turn affects residential investment and property transactions.

This means that the outlook for house prices in the UK is not at all positive. The Bank of England on July 3rd reported on a survey of credit conditions stating that lenders intend to restrict new home loans even more over the next 3 months.

Everyone involved in property is going to be affected by a downturn. This includes everything from homeowners, estate agents, landlords and lawyers to builders and their workmen. This ensure that a property downturn will have wider effects.

Inflation is beginning to rise and the Bank of England is limited to what it can do. In fact despite the problems in the economy dues to rising inflation the Bank may have to increase interest rates. This combined with the decrease of consumers’ purchasing-power due to soaring oil, commodity and food prices, the housing crisis looks set to cause significant damage to the economy.

for the full unedited article visit http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11671702&CFID=12013919&CFTOKEN=25917904

Increase in Traffic

Live Simply has seen a significant growth in traffic over the past few weeks. Alexa figures show a 35% growth over the last three month in page views which has resulted in an increase in reach of 28%. This means that Live Simply is receiving significantly increased web traffic.

Lets hope it continues!

New Domestic / Building / Cleaning Services section on the directory

We have just recently added a several new categories on the Live Simply Directory .

The categories are all related to construction, building and property maintenance.

Take a look at Domestic / Building / Cleaning Service