Cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London

The point of this piece is not that living in Barcelona and commuting to London is <i>sensible</i> -- it&#x27;s that the North London property market has gone totally batshit insane.<p>No, seriously: renting a 2 bedroom flat in a not brilliant suburb of London costs around £25,000 a year, or US $40,000. Then you can add council tax (another £2000), water, electricity, and gas bills, and travel. Upshot: the <i>fixed costs</i> of living in London are on the order of US $50,000 per year (two beds) or around $40,000 per year (one bed). Note that I focus on the two bed option because that&#x27;s the practical minimum for a family unit, or for someone who telecommutes from home. Note also that the average gross income in London is a little under £28,000 per year (before tax).<p>Upshot: normal people and normal families can&#x27;t afford to rent in London any more. The only thing propping up these insane prices is the scarcity induced by the current bubble in the foreign investment housing market. The crash, when it comes, is going to be epic.

Here a fellow hacker from Barcelona.<p>I rented a loft for 6620€&#x2F;year. It&#x27;s mint condition and it&#x27;s in the outskirts of Barcelona. I&#x27;m 12 min in subway to the plaza Catalonia and in 7 min using the train or 20 mins in bus. To be honest, I would never never again will rent in the centre of the city. It&#x27;s expensive and all buildings are antique, without the proper commodities.<p>If you want to come Barcelona, check the outskirts, get a scooter or enjoy the Barcelona transportation system. It&#x27;s wonderful.<p>I want to add some more info about living in Barcelona.<p>The weather is magnifique. It barely rains all the year. You can go mountains withing 2h car travel if you want to enjoy the snow in winter.<p>Eating can be really cheap IF you go to the supermarket, buy all the meals and cook yourself like I do, I saved 300€&#x2F;month doing this instead eating outside. If you can compile rails, you can be a chef, :). I do buy the meals and stuff for around 90€&#x2F;month. That includes the 40lts of water i buy. Then daily i try to buy meat, fish or vegetables for the week and it cost me no more than 220€ month.<p>I pay 90 euros electricity, 30 gas and 40 water every 2 months. 60 euros for 100mbit fiber connection + phone and mobile and that&#x27;s all.

About 5 years ago I did this. I flew from the south of Spain (flying from Jerez on RyanAir) to London once a week for 2 days a week (couch surfing with a friend).<p>Its a hard lifestyle - by about the 10th of these flights you will be sick of the security hassles (and RyanAir) - but it was way better than living in London full time (no offense).<p>I did it for 18 months before finally burning out on it and moving to a full time remote position (which paid less but I decided that that was worth the upgrade in lifestyle).

UK renting is just idiotic at present all over, although especially bonkers in our capital city.<p>Remember that 1 bed flats are especially in demand at present as a result of the (in)famous bedroom tax[1]. A single person or a couple are only allowed 1 bedroom if they need to claim housing benefit (unemployed or low-wage, and remember that in London &#x27;low waged&#x27; is a pretty high threshold, e.g. teachers, social workers, retail staff, bus drivers &amp;c).<p>Bear in mind that building 1 bedroom flats has (hitherto) been regarded as a waste of money for housing associations or councils, so that really only commercial lets are available (at usually twice or three times the rent of a HA&#x2F;council flat with 2 beds), so, ironically, the tax payer will be paying <i>more</i> to move couples out of 2 bed high rise flats in rough areas which are hard to let into expensive private let 1 bed flats. There will be no takers for the high rise flats (unsuitable for children) so they will be mothballed then expensively demolished.<p>Yes, bonkers, but the UK is run by the Daily Fail and other populist idiots.<p>[1] <a href="http://england.shelter.org.uk/get_advice/housing_benefit_and_local_housing_allowance/changes_to_local_housing_allowance/bedroom_tax_from_april_2013" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;england.shelter.org.uk&#x2F;get_advice&#x2F;housing_benefit_and...</a><p>Edit: OK anonymous downvoter, state your reasons

That&#x27;s a roughly 4 hour commute in each direction: 1h flight, 1h train ride from airport to liverpool street + commute to the airport and waiting. And this are, in my experience, conservative numbers.<p>So you spend 128 hours per month commuting, to save 387€. Not what I would call a bargain.<p>Oh, what about double taxation? I&#x27;m pretty sure you&#x27;d be hit by that and that would most likely put you well in the negative.

Cheaper, but fairly ridiculous. Stay in Barcelona and telecommute.<p>Similarly, it would be cheaper for me to rent in Mexico City and commute to my job in Los Angeles. Yes, some global metropolises have lower rents than others.

I&#x27;m still convinced that we&#x27;re just a few years away from a time when people don&#x27;t have to commute to an office just to sit at a computer. That company in London could save some money and so could the employee in Barcelona if telecommuting were an option.

This is silly. Just go southwest a few miles.<p>There is, for instance, a flat steps from the London Overground in South Norwood (<a href="http://www.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/30891717" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoopla.co.uk&#x2F;to-rent&#x2F;details&#x2F;30891717</a>) that is going for £400&#x2F;month (€470&#x2F;month).<p>(It&#x27;s unclear why you&#x27;d want such a long commute, versus living in far-away green suburbs by the train.)

It&#x27;s a 4 hour commute!<p>Why would you live in Central London? You can commute for an hour into Liverpool St and get much cheaper rents.

I&#x27;m not convinced that house prices area actually a big deal, except as an indicator that more housing should be permitted (by zoning laws).<p>There are two arguments that are typically given.<p>Firstly, you want to encourage people of different incomes to live together. I don&#x27;t believe that this is a worthy goal. It&#x27;s not clear that the benefit to people on low incomes outweighs the loss to their high income neighbors. And the richest 1% always find ways to isolate themselves anyway.<p>The second argument is that welfare should taken into account the cost of living. I also believe this within reason, but the welfare system already does this in many ways. In fact, London&#x27;s &quot;one bedroom rule&quot; is a clunky way to do precisely this: it lets people live where they like, but prevents people from purchasing an excessive &quot;quantity&quot; of housing.

Or you could live in Birmingham, in a £650&#x2F;month one-bedroom apartment 10 minutes away from New Street station, where you can take a 70 minute train to London Euston.<p>Sure, Birmingham is not Barcelona or London, but I&#x27;m not sure how you&#x27;d enjoy them by living most of your off-work time in a Ryanair flight.

I like this article as a thought experiment, but I think in practicality, it would probably be miserable to fly to-and-fro 4 days a week.<p>The main cost that was ommitted that would give us an idea whether the commute is worth it is the opportunity cost (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Opportunity_cost</a>). While it&#x27;d be difficult to estimate how much the author&#x27;s time is worth, if we assume that he&#x2F;she gets paid an hourly wage of W, and it takes H hours to commute to and from London, then the opportunity cost would be something like W x H. If that opportunity cost is greater than the 387€ in savings, then it would not be cheaper to commute from an economist&#x27;s perspective.

I just moved to North-West London Two weeks ago and can confirm these numbers. It&#x27;s an interesting write-up and I can see that it&#x27;s been written for the mathematical demonstration rather than the practicality but it does give food for thought.

So he can live in Barcelona and get home at 10 PM and leave for the airport at 5 AM.<p>Who cares if you live in Barcelona if you&#x27;re asleep all the time?

I left Barcelona in 2007 to come to London and although the cost of living is higher here ( I live in West Hampstead ), salaries and opportunities are also much better. Granted, I spend more money per month in fixed costs than my entire salary in Barcelona, but I still save more than I spend.<p>Also, from this article it seems that rents have actually fallen, because in 2007 I could not find that kind of accomodation for that price and I was strugling to save any money compared to now.<p>I guess the housing market collapse in Spain has actually impacted the crazy Barcelona prices of mid 2007.

Had a friend on UCSD that rented at Tijuana and crossed the border everyday to San Diego.

I just moved to London, less than a month ago.<p>I decided that I was willing to pay a premium for my &lt;25 minute commute to work (close to Tottenham Court Road). And as long as other people think the same, rent will go up. Pretty standard supply and demand. Everyone works in the center, and nobody likes to waste 2 hours of their day hopping trains and buses.<p>So this is what you get, take it or leave it, I guess...

This post is also a great idea to start a HN Barcelona meeting :).

It&#x27;s not the point of the article, but 4 hours wouldn&#x27;t be that bad per se. I would hate to be on an airport every day and being with ryan air every day (I rather pay a lot more than fly ryan air personally; I am almost 2 meters in length and quite bulky in width due to food and daily gym; ryan air is cruel punishment, no matter the cost), but when I still worked in an office in the Netherlands (granted, that&#x27;s over 10 years ago), I would spend 2.5-3 hours at least in traffic jams. At least in a plane you can read a book or do some work. Sitting in a car, usually in the rain&#x2F;cold, foot on the break ready to move yet another 30 cm I might even consider worse than ryan air...

so 1500 GBP is about 2420 USD 1 bedroom in the good part of SF, USA cost about 2500&#x2F;month.<p>Sure, there&#x27;s no council tax and utilities are cheaper. Still, its pretty close.<p>I bet Paris ain&#x27;t so far from that either, and let&#x27;s not talk about NYC.<p>Basically, all of the large tech cities prices are &quot;batshit insane&quot;.<p>The only hope I see, barred 1h30&#x2F;2H by plane travel time, as the author suggests.. is remote work whenever possible. You can then live 3-4h away from big cities (so you can still get together if needed), and prices are slashed by 10.

How exactly does one qualify x as cheaper than y when the comparison requires y to omit a massive economic component: the opportunity cost or value of one&#x27;s time?<p>Additionally, why propose such an intrinsically inefficient model? What about using a hostel on M, Tu, W, and only fly in M AM and out Th PM? Monthly commute ~28 hours, quality of living benefits, and probably save even more $.<p>Can someone from the EU comment on the potential tax benefits of an international live&#x2F;work arrangement?

Ryanair lies about flying to &#x27;Barcelona&#x27; - it actually flies to Gerona, about 95km away (1hr by ground transportation):<p><a href="http://gospain.about.com/od/ryanair/qt/ryan_barcelona.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gospain.about.com&#x2F;od&#x2F;ryanair&#x2F;qt&#x2F;ryan_barcelona.htm</a><p>Although, Gerona is itself a beautiful city and would be a nice place to live.

Now how much does he earn per hour? How much time does he waste on a long commute each of those four days a week?

Funnily enough, I came to the exact same conclusion last week while visiting London, from Dublin.<p>€30 return flights and it&#x27;s faster than Barcelona, 1hr flights (and you can show up 45 mins before flight leaves for IE-&gt;UK).<p>Even using Hotel Tonight while I was in London, accommodation was €200+ on a Tuesday night.

To Barcelona hackers - which districts are the best to rent a nice modern-built loft&#x2F;apartment:<p>- from quality angle?<p>- from price angle?<p>Edit: formatting

It is well established that prices RyanAir advertises are not prices passengers pay.<p>Given the option of the hassle and commute, people would prefer to just live in London. Which is the whole point- real estate pricing is efficient in this case.

Just wanted to add that the apartment that the article refers to is located in a really nice place of Barcelona. Definitely not the center, but relatively close to FC Barcelona stadium, and close to the rich part of the city.

It might at least get you a HON circle membership if you take Star Alliance flights but daily use of Ryan Air can&#x27;t be beneficial for your mental stability.

My friend works for one the City. He is permanently renting hotel room nearby. He says it is actually cheaper compared to normal rent.

East London is where it&#x27;s at! It is cheaper to buy than rent though!

Time to move to Texas!