My search for London’s cheapest flat

Maternal nocturnal worry number 57a: how are our offspring going to get their toes on any rung of the property ladder if they want to carry on living in London? I’m sure thousands of us mothers of young adults lie awake at 2.30 a.m. contemplating the fact that a one-bedroom flat in Leytonstone now costs £375,000. We curse ourselves for not having bought the whole house next door to us in 1989 when it was for sale for a third of that amount. 

Last week I set out to find the cheapest flat for sale in Greater London. By ‘for sale’ I mean fully for sale, not a ‘shared ownership’ situation in which the buyer acquires 25 per cent of the property and the housing association owns 75 per cent, and the buyer pays a varying ratio of mortgage and rent, gradually ‘staircasing’ upwards towards full ownership. This sounds seductively affordable, but it can turn into an extortionate nightmare, because if any repairs are needed, the part-owner has to pay the full cost. It’s a brutally one-sided deal, to be steered clear of. 

And by ‘flat’, I mean a flat available to anyone, not a ‘retirement’ flat for over-55s only, which tend to be the cheapest. Scroll down the Rightmove and Zoopla offerings in remote parts of outer London, stipulating ‘min beds: studio’ and ‘max beds: 1’ and you go down from the £300,000s, through the twos, to the one-hundred-thousands. This was what I was after: the flats (all of them leasehold) going for £160,000, and very occasionally £150,000. 

I viewed properties at these lowest prices at all four compass points of Greater London, travelling by public transport and folding bike. What makes these properties cheap is not only that they’re tiny, but also that they’re hard to get to.