Quote:
Originally Posted by jonbxx
On potential side effect of this whole COVID thing will be the rise in home working. If it really sticks, then we could easily a flattening of the housing market where cheaper areas will become a possibility if you only work from home. The opposite will be true for classic commuter towns.
We are certainly asking that question here - why are we paying so much to live in a location convenient for commuting into London when we don't actually commute into London? We could easily cash out on our ex-council 3 bed semi worth over half a million and get something verynice elsewhere..
|
We cashed in very nicely by doing this, 20 odd years ago. We moved from just outside the M25 to central Scotland by negotiating a move from head office to a customer service centre on the basis that a significant number of the teams I actually worked with were based there, even though my own department and reporting line remained down south. We had only owned our ex council terrace for 5 years but its value had increased by more than 50% in that time. Needless to say we could afford rather more in Scotland than we could in the orbit of London.
The British economy has become absurdly imbalanced towards London and the southeast, which is bizarre when you consider how recently this wasn’t the case at all. When manufacturing of various sorts was our thing, there was immense wealth in the north of England. With that gone, the powerhouse is financial services in the City of London, and it is so powerful that it forces everything in towards the centre. I had a conversation with someone high up at Boots years ago who used to complain that despite being headquartered in Nottingham, they had to invest first and most in flagship stores in central London because the city investors they needed to keep onside were too basically lazy to jump on a train or drive their Porches beyond Watford Gap services.
There have been attempts at regional regeneration in the past but its all been small beer in the grand scheme of things. Even the Northern Powerhouse initiative is obviously fragile and its various levelling up projects are near the top of the list of things to cut when times are hard. The step-change is indeed likely to come from both the rollout of super-high-speed networks and also the realisation that many more of us can actually stay home and use them. Last night I had a Zoom meeting with some folks and halfway through it occurred to me that 2 years ago, despite the technology being widely available via multiple messaging services, culturally we simply wouldn’t have considered it and the meeting would have been arranged at someone’s house, with all the inconvenience of having to plan to go out on a wet midweek winter night.
Later this year I’m moving to a house with FTTP. I can’t wait.
---------- Post added at 09:26 ---------- Previous post was at 09:23 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1andrew1
Yes, have been thinking along the same lines too. Providing you've got a good internet location then you can live anywhere in the country, though living abroad does present some issues.
|
There are difficulties with remote working if you’re part of a team that functions best when it is able to swap ideas across desks, and not just in formal meetings. Furthermore if you’re customer facing it becomes increasingly difficult to forge relationships with people if you’re too distant from their everyday points of reference. It’s one of the reasons why overseas call centres are always a bad idea. I suspect in time we will achieve a balance of remote and in-person working, and it’s that requirement to be semi-available that presents the biggest challenge to those who fancy working for a British company from the comfort of a sun lounger in Marbella.