Owning a Home in the Suburbs of London / NYT

the clash say it the best...... ( or maybe "madness" would be the better pick....:-)

die clash fassen es am besten zusammen...obwohl auch madness gut gepasst hätte...



Alexandra Gilmore’s three-bedroom home in Surrey, a suburban county about an hour southwest of London, could not be more different from the spacious house with a big backyard and lots of storage space in which she grew up just outside Dallas...



... and thanks to her new husband, Ms. Gilmore was able to climb aboard the property ladder in what is now the world’s most expensive market. The couple decided in November 2004 to buy a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house, with 2,200 square feet of living space, in a development in Reigate, Surrey......


She and her husband now commute to London by train, a journey that takes about 40 minutes from the Earlswood station near Reigate.

Ms. Gilmore said she fell in love with the house right away, even though it needed loads of work.

It was on the market for 219,950 pounds (about $440,000) but they were able to get it for 205,000 pounds (about $410,000) because of its dilapidated state......

She said they stayed with friends for nearly eight weeks while the worst of the renovations were completed. In all, she said, the work cost about 24,000 pounds (about $48,000).

“What’s great is that the house was recently valued at around 270,000 pounds” (almost $540,000), Ms. Gilmore said. “The houses in our development sell quickly — rarely staying on the market for more than six weeks. This is really because our development is a five-minute walk from the Reigate High Street, which has great shops and restaurants.”

But nothing in and around London stays on the market for long. In recent months the city has become the world’s most expensive property market, with buyers paying anywhere from $4,000 to $6,000 a square foot for ultraluxury housing in some parts of central London, compared with

$3,000 to $4,500 per square foot in Manhattan, according to the real estate agency CB Richard Ellis.

And real estate agents say that a lack of supply has resulted in some London properties changing hands in just 48 hours.

While prices throughout the country are not as robust, those in Surrey are almost at the same level as those in parts of the capital. And Reigate was one of the region’s top performers in 2006, with house prices rising by an average of 29 percent.

In Reigate, the average price of a detached, or free-standing, property is 509,508 pounds (more than $1 million); the average price of a semidetached house is 289,917 pounds (about $579,384); the average price of an apartment is 108,743 pounds (about $217,486). Ms. Gilmore’s home is what is called in Britain a mid-terraced house — a rowhouse — and is classified as semi-detached.