Owner-occupiers aged 65-plus hold a record estimated £2.587 trillion of net housing wealth - and their homes are worth a total of £2.735 trillion.
Those figures come from high end agency Savills, which says the vast majority of the over-65s’ wealth is mortgage free.
The analysis reveals that with 50 to 64-year-olds holding an estimated further £2.213 trillion of housing equity (including £679 billion in the private rented sector) in total the over 50s now hold 78 per cent of all of the UK's privately held housing wealth.
Over the past 10 years, the amount of net housing wealth held by owner-occupiers aged 65 and over has risen by over £1.111 trillion, according to the agency.
Precisely half of the total housing wealth in the South West is owned by those over 65s. The region which is popular with downsizers and retirees for a host of lifestyle reasons sees older homeowners make up the largest percentage of equity.
However, owner-occupier wealth is highest by value in the South East. Here, over 65s hold £475 billion of housing wealth, which is more than £8 billion more than the total for the whole of the North of England and Scotland combined.
The South East has also seen the biggest increase in housing wealth held by those over 65s over the past 10 years, increasing by £248 trillion, which is more than 2.5 times the growth in housing equity seen by those under the age of 50 in that region.
“While falls in mortgaged homeownership among younger households have abated over the past five years, older households have benefitted from the bulk of growth in housing wealth over the past decade. Primarily this is because those who took advantage of the boom in homeownership in the latter part of the 20th century have reached the point where they have paid off their mortgage debt. But, it also reflects the wealth they have accumulated in residential investments, which they have seen as an important part of their retirement provision” comments Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills.
“The resulting generational divide in housing wealth sits at the heart of a lot of the tensions around housing, and how these older home owners elect to deploy their equity has the potential to shape the market for the next generation. Differing attitudes towards new housing delivery, property taxes and buy-to-let investment are all heavily influenced by the gap between the haves and have-nots.
“As we look forward, higher mortgage costs and rising rents mean we expect to continue to see the bulk of housing policy focused on the needs of younger households. However the provision of more retirement housing along with other incentives to make downsizing more appealing are also fundamentally important. Such measures would help unlock much-needed family housing and equity that can be used to help younger generations to get on and trade up the housing ladder, especially given the vital role the Bank of Mum and Dad increasingly plays in accessing the UK housing market for the first time.
“In the private rented sector, there is a delicate balance to be struck. With several private landlords at or approaching retirement age, too tight a policy squeeze risks creating further pinch-points in the availability of private rented stock.”
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Don’t worry by 2030 the whole lot will be worth about 27 p
So why if they have gods ideas to help dont folk talk reason and discuss things to help the situation. Not blame others and bring out laws which mess things up and get backs up.
Most of us 'boomers' have worked hard for what we have
Andrew
You really have to stop using old fashioned, out moded and potentially offensive language like "work", especially when accompanied by "hard", which, if they understood the concept, would be enough to give nightmares to the "young people " (formerly known as kids, sprogs, children and other outmoded terms and in previous simpler times as boys and girls).
Other words to be avoided are wages, salary, earnings and savings, which all can be associated with previous harsher times when employment was the universally recognised route out of poverty.
Poverty has been largely eliminated along with the imperative or even desire to work for a living.
Acceptable words nowadays include allowances, benefits, empowerment, entitlement, respect, human rights, free expression ( provided it's "woke " and acceptable to those professing to be woke) but please don't imply these things need to be earned!
BTW, when I was young, "old money" referred to money inherited down through generations, not the lifetime savings or earnings of a single generation brought up in a time when mistakes, misdeeds and laziness were sanctioned, not excused, ignored or rewarded.
Obviously older people have more housing wealth than younger people as we've had longer to accumulate it. Even if that simply means we've had longer to pay down standard repayment mortgages.
Every generation has access to different housing assistance schemes but it is up to the individual to grab whatever opportunity is offered to them.
We had the Right to Buy (if we were Council tenants), interest only and self cert mortgages. More recently there has been shared ownership, HTB, various ISAs with government bonuses lumped on top. It's different to what we had and far more tax payer funded.
Millions of us jumped on the BTL bandwagon and some have done quite nicely out of it for many years. For a great many self employed people it was the only way we could make any retirement provision as our incomes were very erratic.
Younger people could try BTL but there are huge barriers that didn't previously exist. Extra SDLT, loss of Child Benefit due to being taxed on turnover, no sensible long term exit route due to staggeringly high CGT with no indexation relief. They could buy through a limited company but how many first time landlords would want the expense and extra accountancy fees if they don't even know how many BTLs they are likely to finish up with?
I don’t know what point Savills are making . I would have expected the over 65’s to be Mortgage free if they were ever going to have it payed off.
It too late to be trying to pay it off when you are an Old Age Pensioner.
So are they saying it was the wrong thing to do and shouldn’t be Mortgage free or now that they have paid it off its unfair and should be attacked like private landlords and take it from them again to help the doss anyone that does any thing proper must be pillarized.
Oh my God! Stunning revelation..."older people who have worked hard and saved harder; those who have been alive a long time, having been responsible and self reliant & prioritised their home and paying off their debts over holidays, new cars, new phones and TVs, who have been disciplined & paid off their mortgages early are holding the most housing stock". Durrrhh!
And the embittered entitled wokery hate us for it.
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