From the Daily Mail
Campaigning football star Marcus Rashford has bought five luxury homes worth at least £2 million, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The striker, 23, has ploughed an estimated £1.5 million into three houses on a new estate in Wilmslow, Cheshire, as well as buying a house and flat in Macclesfield.
I could get into how awful it is that a productive footballer and nice guy, becomes a parasitic landlord, but he probably hasn't thought too much about that. But, I think this is a bad investment.
Our host has explained a few times about the relationship of commuting time and rents, that the closer you are to the office, the more your rent rises, and that particularly applies to Wilmslow.
I know Wilmslow quite well. I spent a few months working in Wythenshawe, which is like Syria on a bad day, so I chose to stay in Wilmslow. It's also not far from Manchester Airport and a 20 minute rail commute from Manchester Piccadilly, the main rail station.
If you compare the prices in Wilmslow and Congleton, it's around £450K for a 3 bed semi vs £300K in Congleton. Congleton is 50 minutes from Manchester by train.
But the value of being 30 minutes closer to the office is going to diminish if you're only doing it 2 days a week rather than 5. Instead of there being a £150K difference over Congleton to someone doing that, it's more like a 60K difference. OK, not everyone is going to be doing this post-Covid, but most of those people are office workers in the centre of Manchester and the effect is going to be big there.
This is why London rents have fallen anything from 3% to 7% on a year ago (depending on who you ask) while other rents have risen. If you aren't going into the office, or not that often, you don't need to be in Hammersmith, you can be in Slough, or Swindon.
I think the whole of this is going to take time to work out. Much of it will come as people move. Home owners near to the centre of cities are going to think this is a short-term blip or gully, and hold out, not selling as the prices continue to fall rather than bailing out.
8 comments:
Agreed on the price/commute time thing.
Yes, Rashford has turned from nice guy to parasite. But I'd still defend Rashford against attacks from the Mail, which is hard core Home-Owner-Ist and normally praises and encourages this sort of behaviour.
All that lovely cash capital taken out of production and into rent seeking...
Having already embarrassed the government into providing free meals for children whose parents are already in receipt of child allowance (those Netflix subscriptions won't pay for themselves), and obtaining an MBE along the way, perhaps he intends to build a proprty empire to further embarrass the government into providing free accommodation for the homeless (the fact that he will have several properties available for social services to pay him the rent is purely coincidental, allegedly). He may even get a CBE out of this.
Mark,
Yup. The guy has made his money quite honestly. He provides entertainment to millions. If you don't like that you pay for it, stop buying replica shirts. He doesn't get in the way of my hobbies doing so, so good luck to him.
Lola,
I'm never sure how good an investment it really is. Everyone tries to work around high rent, don't they?
Penseivat,
It's odd to me that there's still free school meals when 75% of kids take a packed lunch in. When every kid had them, they made sense, but now, can't their parents stick a sandwich and an apple in a box?
TS.
By definition land owning for 'investment' is rent seeking. Mr R has used his 'savings' (and maybe debt) to buy these properties. He is buying into the land factor of production, that he is not putting money into labour and capital - the wealth creating component.
The yields on let domestic property seem to be about 4% gross round here - East Anglia, which not very good. I think that all these 'investors' are looking to capital gain to make the returns work.
We aren't told about Rashford's intentions for these houses - which seem relatively cheap for Wilmslow.
Perhaps he's bought them to house members of his family, so they're all close by.
@Penseivat in work benefits are largely to compensate the low to middle paid for the state taking so much of their private property via VAT, NI, etc and making them pay over the odds for private rented accommodation. Close to 50% of families with children are needlessly on these effective tax refunds. Absent VAT, NI and rents multiple times the cost of building, maintaining, ensuring and a normal profit margin, most of these families would be able to provide for their own needs.
Curious why you single out Netflix. This is an innovative business that has produced a lot of valuable economic activity. If half of working age families should not be spending their money on this, what should the people working in there and in similar industries do instead? Same with complaints of people eating smashed avocados etc
Did you know the Earl of Macclesfield is my next door neighbour? His place is up for sale at £7M
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