JERSEY’S spiralling housing costs have been laid bare once again, with the latest figures showing that property prices climbed by £1,788 a week on average in 2021.
One-bedroom flats now cost on average £339,000 – a near-£40,000 rise compared to 12 months earlier – while average working households are unable to ‘service a mortgage affordably’ for a two-bedroom apartment, according to the latest House Price Index report released by Statistics Jersey, which covered the final quarter of last year.
The average cost of a house rose to £673,000 in 2021, a 16% increase from £580,000 in the preceding year. All property types recorded their highest annual average price seen to date.
Following the release of the report, Assistant Economic Development Minister Kirsten Morel took to Twitter to warn that ‘the housing crisis may well be the biggest single threat to Jersey’s continued prosperity’.
Former Housing Minister Sam Mézec said that the rocketing costs were gutting the Island of ‘any form of middle class’ and that businesses would struggle to find staff as more and more young people were forced to leave Jersey.
He added: ‘We are hearing that businesses are struggling to find accommodation for staff and that young people are leaving the Island because they cannot afford to live here. These figures only make both of those factors worse. These people are going to suffer the most and it has really bad consequences for our economy.
‘It is going to gut our Island of any form of middle class, because if you’re employed, skilled and still can’t afford to live here, then why would you want to stay? We will be forced to replace Islanders with temporary people who we can’t find accommodation for anyway. We are just becoming a more unequal society.’
According to the report, an average two-bedroom flat now costs £496,000, while two-bedroom houses hit £652,000.
The average price of a UK property at the end of 2021 stood at £271,000 – around 2½ times lower than the Jersey average of £673,000 – while even the UK’s most expensive region, London, was more than £150,000 lower than the Island’s figure.
For the first time the average cost of a three-bedroom family house climbed above £800,000 in quarter three of 2021, meaning that a couple on average earnings in Jersey would have to borrow nine times their combined salary if they put down a £40,000 deposit. By the end of 2021, the average price of a three-bedroom house had risen to £861,000. A four-bedroom home rose on average to £1,339,000.
