Zillow? Rightmove!

One of the fun things I do every now and then is to bring up Zillow to check on houses for sale in our neighborhood, as well as those which have sold. Gives me a pretty good idea as to house prices around here, whether prices are increasing or decreasing, how long it takes to sell them, as well as … who the heck decided that particular interior design was a good idea and looked amazing?

However, Zillow is for the US. Finding out the same kind of info in England escaped me, until I learned about Rightmove. Pretty much the same user experience: select the area you’re interested in, and then peruse what’s for sale.

So, last weekend, I had a fun hour glancing through properties for sale near where I used to live way back when.

The funniest one in a sense was the first flat I bought in Langford Green in Camberwell in early 1982. I was about to get married to my first wife and we needed a place to live in. After a bit of looking around we found this one bedroom flat in a relatively new private development of flats and terraced houses. Basically: bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen. The price? £24,000. In those days the rule of thumb was that the maximum mortgage you could get was 2.5 times your annual salary, and this price was just below that. Yeah, me on £10K a year! So I bought it and that was that, we lived there a couple of years and then upgraded to one of the terraced houses on the same estate.

Anyway, it seems that the flat next door to it is currently for sale. Exactly the same layout. The price? £400,000. I had to laugh.

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