Q My partner and I would like to buy a property and don’t plan on having kids. We know that house prices are expensive around good schools, but how do we find properties that are not near good schools in order to benefit from this? BT
A You are not wrong that properties near good schools tend to cost more. Research by Lloyds in August 2014 which looked at prices of properties in the catchment areas of England’s 30 best state schools found they were an average of £21,000 higher than the average house price in the county in which the school is based. More recent research by estate agents Savills in March this year found that the cost of homes near the top 400 best-performing schools can be more than 25% higher than in other areas.
In general, the premium on the price of a property in a good school’s catchment area has been considered to be the price you pay for getting into a good state school and so avoiding school fees. But what’s interesting about the Savills research – which looks at both state and fee-paying schools – is that being near a good fee-paying school will also push up property prices.
Savills’s interactive map is a useful starting point for identifying where not to buy property although its data covers only the top 400 schools so it won’t give a warning signal for other schools. For example, Phil & Jim state primary school in Oxford doesn’t appear in the Savills’ survey but it does push up property prices in its catchment area.
Keeping away from any properties where a particular school is named in the estate agent’s particulars would help avoiding premium prices as would checking a school’s Ofsted perfomance tables which give one of four possible inspection grades: 1 is outstanding; 2 is good; 3 is satisfactory or requires improvement; and 4 is inadequate. Buying a property near a school with a grade 3 or 4 is likely to get you more for your money than one near a school with a grade 1 or 2.
Muddled about mortgages? Concerned about conveyancing? Email your homebuying and borrowing worries to Virginia Wallis at virginia.wallis.freelance@theguardian.com
