logo
'£250k for a beach hut in Southwold? That's bonkers'

'£250k for a beach hut in Southwold? That's bonkers'

BBC News6 days ago
A beach hut in a coastal town has hit the market for an eye-watering £250,000 - just £19,000 less than the average price of a home in the UK.Described as "beautifully presented" by estate agent Durrants, the grey and white wooden hut is located at South Green in Southwold.While a quarter of a million pounds for a seafront cabin may seem to be a staggering amount of money, demand for beach huts has soared since the Covid-19 pandemic.The average cost of a beach hut in the UK is £45,000, so does the price tag attached to Helluvathing simply reflect a surge in popularity or a market spiralling out of control?
'It's bonkers!'
Claire Baldwin purchased her beach hut in Southwold five years ago when they were "not worth as much as they are now"."Southwold is just a really beautiful place and Suffolk is a lovely part of the world but the prices have gone crazy in the last few years," she told the BBC."A quarter of a million pounds is a bit ridiculous but people will pay it - it is bonkers."Mandy Moyes added: "I'd love to have a beach hut myself and if money was no object then I would definitely buy one," she said."I recently bought a shed for a £1,000 and I thought that was a lot of money."
'Price of a house'
Holidaymaker Annette McCullian described the price of beach huts as "shocking"."When you think people cannot afford houses but people are spending that money on beach huts, she says. "It is the price of a house but if somebody wants it, and they have the money, then they will buy it."Even £40,000 sounds a lot… but I've got a nice little spot here, in the shade, for free."
'Just a shed on the beach'
Claire Brier, 69, who has lived in Southwold for 25 years, said owning a beach hut was "becoming a competition and not one I am prepared to go into"."It's just bonkers and really anyone who has got that sort of money should be having a serious talk with themselves about how they spend it," she said.Poppy Scale, 34, said being able to use her friend's beach hut four times a year was a practical option when heading to the beach with her young children.While she loves what beach huts can offer, she told the BBC that £250,000 for one was "an outstanding amount of money that could be spent on something better"."I think beach huts should be valued at about £10,000 because at the end of the day it is just a shed on the beach – the cost has gone up astronomically."
'Wonderful'
Charlie Papworth, head of residential and commercial sales at Diamond Mills estate agents in Felixstowe, told the BBC "they are so much more than a shed"."It is a luxury and some people remortgage their houses to buy these things so it's worth what people are willing to pay," he said."Is someone willing to pay £250,000? Time will tell."
Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Britain's pension crisis is about to get even worse
Britain's pension crisis is about to get even worse

Telegraph

time27 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

Britain's pension crisis is about to get even worse

The Government's review of pensions is asking some of the right questions. Top of the list is the age at which they should start to be paid. It is not a given that the state should fund the last third of someone's life, regardless of need. That is a choice, and a recent one. When the Old Age Pension began in 1909, it was paid from 70 and you had to have lived in the UK for 20 years and to be of 'good character'. It was means-tested, too – you needed to earn less than £21 a year to qualify. So, Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is right to look first at the state pension age. And right to commission a report on the proportion of adult life spent in retirement. When the modern state pension was introduced in 1948, a 65-year-old could expect to receive it for just 13 years, about a sixth of their life expectancy. She is right, too, to investigate ways to boost pension savings – 8pc of earnings is not enough – and to broaden the number of people putting money aside for their retirement. Only half of working-age people are doing that, a fifth of the self-employed and fewer still of some ethnic minorities. That's not good. As ever, when it comes to pensions policy, there is also a have-cake-and-eat-it problem. The Government spends about 5pc of GDP on pensions – more than £120bn last year – but it persists with the fantasy that the amount paid to pensioners can rise into the future by the highest of earnings, inflation or 2.5pc. The triple lock is unaffordable. The unavoidable truth about pensions is that small changes in a range of unpredictable variables make a big difference when they are compounded over the decades that we now expect to live after we have stopped working. This is true for the good changes that government policy and personal choice can deliver. And for the bad ones that we can't do much about. That's why the Government is asking only some of the right questions. There are others it needs to address, all of which are difficult. The biggest pensions challenge may well be one that no one is talking about. This all became abundantly clear to me recently when I helped a colleague out with a deceptively simple question. He wanted to know what rate of investment return he needed to aim for in order to achieve the comfortable retirement he was hoping to enjoy. To answer that, I employed my pathetically rudimentary Excel skills to build a spreadsheet with a few variables that we could play with until we arrived at a plausible plan. I plugged in how much he had saved; how much he intended to put aside in future, and for how long; when he planned to wind down into semi-retirement and when he would stop completely; when he would take the state pension; and the return he would aim to achieve on his investments both before and after he stopped working. I ran the numbers from his current age of 52 until, with luck, he turns 90. Crucially, I had to make some quite big assumptions, the most important of which were that the triple lock would continue throughout his life and that the Bank of England would succeed in hitting its 2pc inflation target. By tweaking all these variables and assumptions, we were able to monitor their impact on the cumulative size of his pension pot. As you might expect, saving more for longer in an only moderately inflationary environment ended well. Working for a bit longer made a big difference. Accepting a lower income in retirement helped. None of this is rocket science, and probably doesn't require a Pensions Commission to confirm. That said, I was surprised by some of the things we discovered. One was the remarkable power of starting early. The principal reason that my colleague was pleasantly surprised by his required rate of investment return was that he had spent the previous 30 years studiously paying into his company pension, supported by a generous employer. The first additional question the Government needs to find an answer to is how to get young people engaged with their pensions. It may be boring, but it is not as boring as being old and poor. The second thing the spreadsheet taught us was the power of delay. Working just a few more years, even in a part-time capacity, can transform the arithmetic of our pension savings. Paying in for longer and taking out for less time, together with a few extra years of compound investment growth, is a magical combination. Find what you enjoy and keep doing it. But the biggest eye-opener for me was the devastating impact of even a modest uptick in inflation. A quick and easy way to make your money run out is to stop work and then try to maintain your standard of living by increasing the amount you draw down from your pension in line with rising prices. For my colleague, nudging up the assumed inflation rate from 2pc to 3pc was the difference between a £700,000 pension pot at the age of 90 and running out of cash completely a couple of years earlier. The pensions crisis that no one is talking about, therefore, is on the face of it nothing to do with pensions at all. Yes, more people need to save more, to start earlier and to carry on for longer. The Government has a role to play in encouraging all of those. But it, and the Bank of England, has an even bigger task. To keep inflation at a level where it doesn't blow our plans out of the water.

Corpay to acquire FTSE 250 fintech alpha group for £1.8bn
Corpay to acquire FTSE 250 fintech alpha group for £1.8bn

Daily Mail​

time27 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

Corpay to acquire FTSE 250 fintech alpha group for £1.8bn

Another British fintech champion is to be bought by American predators – in a deal worth £1.8billion. The board of Alpha Group – led by former Virgin Money boss Jayne-Anne Gadhia (pictured) – has accepted a bid from US payments giant Corpay. Shares in the FTSE 250 payments company soared more than 25 per cent after bosses recommended that investors back a sweetened 4250p-per-share offer. The deal comes amid a mounting crisis as a takeover frenzy accelerates. Research from broker Peel Hunt shows the UK is on course for the biggest year of takeovers since 2021, after £74billion of offers in the first half of 2025. Scientific testing firm Spectris has agreed to be bought by American private equity firm KKR for £4.7billion in the biggest deal of the year after a bidding war with Advent International. US semiconductor group Qualcomm is to buy British chipmaker Alphawave for £1.8billion and Deliveroo was swooped on by DoorDash with a £2.9billion offer. Another takeover battle saw Primary Health Properties beat KKR to buy GP surgery owner Assura for £1.8billion. And companies are switching listings to New York, with fintech darling Wise the latest planning to defect. Meanwhile, a lack of fresh listings through initial public offerings means they are not being replaced. Alpha turned down Corpay's initial £1.2billion offer in May but, after talks, the latest bid is a 55 per cent premium to Alpha's undisturbed share price of 2745p on May 1, before news of the takeover interest became public. Dan Coatsworth, an investment analyst at AJ Bell, said: 'The market completely misjudged how much Corpay would offer, judging by the share price jump on the formal bid.' 'While the shares enjoyed a little bump on the initial approach, the market didn't price in a successful bid. The fact Alpha rejected a proposal made it clear to Corpay that it would have to dig a lot deeper or walk away. It got the message loud and clear and Corpay looks to have gone in with its best offer. The 55 per cent bid premium is much more generous than the 40 per cent average seen across UK-listed takeovers so far in 2025,' Coatsworth said. Corpay, an S&P 500 company with a market capitalisation of around £17billion, has its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Following the sale, Alpha will continue to be based in London. But there could be 'possible role overlaps' in some administrative and head office functions, the companies have warned.

Could YOU do a child's maths homework? Take our test to find out
Could YOU do a child's maths homework? Take our test to find out

Daily Mail​

time27 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

Could YOU do a child's maths homework? Take our test to find out

One in three adults, 32 per cent, say they don't have enough basic maths knowledge to help a child with their homework - and their finances could be suffering as a result. As many as 27 per cent of adults have faced financial issues or put off financial tasks in the last year, according to research from Barclays. Of course, Pythagoras' Theorem and quadratic equations might not exactly translate to problems involving your mortgage or credit card rates, but they can teach useful skills such as critical thinking and logic. Despite a number of benefits from school maths classes, they tend to be lacking in direct financial applications to help students in later life, leading to the current situation in which many adults are finding themselves. This is Money has previously reported that financial education is falling short in schools. Recent figures show 84 per cent of schoolchildren want financial education to be included in the new national curriculum. How much primary school maths could you help with? You might not be willing to try your hand at A-Level or GCSE maths papers, but what about when it comes to primary school maths? How many of these questions, taken from past SATs papers, can you answer? 1. Write the missing square number (X) to make this addition correct. 8² + X² = 73 2. Write the missing number to make this calculation correct. 754 × 6 + 754 × 3 = 754 × [ ] 3. Write the missing number to make this division correct. 15,000 ÷ [ ]= 75 Vim Maru, CEO of Barclays UK said, 'We know that people's relationship with money starts to be formed around the age of seven so it's crucial that we are providing children with the number confidence to help them manage and grow their finances in later life.' Figures from audience research firm KidsKnowBest reveal that 46 per cent of children aged 7-14 are worried about money and their future, with 38 per cent saying they are stressed about finances. Eight out of ten adults believe that more resources dedicated to using maths in everyday life would improve financial confidence in the future, with the same proportion recognising that these skills are essential for making informed financial decisions. People are at least aware of their shortcomings, with 39 per cent keen to improve their number skills, according to the research. More younger people too, some 61 per cent, said they would like to improve their numeracy skills. Some 43 per cent said they think their finances would be in a stronger position if they had better skills and confidence when it comes to maths. Among those aged 18 to 27, this figure is even higher, with 76 per cent saying their finances would benefit from having deeper mathematical knowledge. Sam Sims, chief executive of charity National Numeracy said: 'We encourage everyone to have the basics of numeracy in place before they reach for their calculators, so they can understand the calculation, make sense of the numbers, and spot if something is not right. 'Having the confidence to use numbers in daily life is a vital skill - whether for work, helping children with homework, or managing money. And not feeling number confident is nothing to be ashamed of - millions of people in the UK feel the same, but everyone can improve with some practice and the right support.' Barclays has partnered with National Numeracy to train 'numeracy champions' in 60 primary schools, which it says will help to boost the numeracy skills or 13,000 children, parents, carers and staff. Sims said: 'Our new partnership with Barclays will help thousands of people build that confidence, supporting better decisions at home, in school and with their finances.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store