Average UK House Buyers Would Spend £6500 Extra for Fast Broadband Speeds
A new survey of 2,700 British home buyers has claimed that an average purchaser would be willing to pay an additional £6,500 for a property if it meant they would be guaranteed to have excellent broadband speed, although the survey fails to clarify what “excellent” actually means.
Apparently all of the respondents to the Broadbanddeals.co.uk poll agreed that they would be discouraged from purchasing a house if the only available broadband connectivity was poor or slow, with 62% admitting that they were already used to a fast connection in their current home and didn’t wish to downgrade. Meanwhile 27% said they needed fast broadband because they worked from home.
Top aspects that most deter home buyers
1. Poor / slow broadband connections – 88%
2. Above average levels of crime – 81%
3. A lack of local transport links / motorway access – 73%
4. A lack of nightlife / shops – 64%
5. A lack of local nurseries / schools – 58%
The fact that access to faster broadband connectivity is so important to such a large proportion of people is no surprise and plenty of other surveys have echoed similar results, although the decision about how much you pay for a house and what matters most in that equation will always come down to personal choice, which is different for everybody.
Sadly the survey does not appear to have defined what should constitute “excellent broadband“, which is important because everybody is likely to have a different opinion. On top of that the rising coverage of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) networks, which are currently estimated to reach around 93% of UK premises, may make this debate less relevant until “ultrafast” (100Mbps+) becomes necessary as a basic requirement.
A similar online survey conducted by ISPreview.co.uk in 2015 found that for 67% of respondents the minimum broadband speed that a new home buyer could tolerate was 50Mbps+, with 17.8% choosing 25Mbps+ and 12.2% picking 10Mbps+. The same survey also noted that 66.4% would NOT pay extra for a house with “superfast broadband“.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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So a survey on a broadband site show broadband is the biggest concern?
In another survey 90% of visitors to the Vatican said it was important to them that the Pope was a Catholic.
They claim the survey was conducted specifically with “home buyers”, but no details given.
These surveys are intended for one thing. To get the company who commissioned the survey mentioned in the media including, preferably, the social kind. Any fact-finding element is purely secondary.
Not that I’d query the principle that a decent quality of broadband is important in most house purchasing decisions. In my case, an acceptable level of broadband (about 8mbps minimum download in my case) was one of several pre-reqs when I bought a house, along with access by foot to a shop, transport and so on. One of the reasons I moved to a small Cotswold town and not a rural village.
There is no doubt that the lack of decent BB will become a problem in selling more remote houses in future as it becomes ever more essential. If the differential is (as claimed) £6.5k per house, that’s clearly ample to deal with the issue when averaged out. Unfortunately there’s not ready mechanism by which that differential can be used to finance infrastructure. Perhaps somebody can come up with some way to deal close that particular circle.
Wouldn’t a USO with ECC’s square the circle? Using £3,400 of subsidy and £6,500 of ECC ought to get you somewhere.
It would indeed, but then I still have an idea the person who bought that house (theoretically) £6,500 cheaper than an equivalent in an areas with “good” broadband is probably still going to complain. £6,500 of your own money for a 10mbps service is going so sound expensive when you put it that way.
Human nature is like that…
nb. I was really thinking of a way of exploiting the difference to upgrade whole areas benefiting existing occupiers. Something creative, like a deferred charge in the event of a sale.
That kind of deferred charge would be an excellent idea … though Ofcom’s 2 year max might make it hard.
With our split tiers in the UK, it is really only the physical infrastructure provider (such as Openreach) that needs the protection. If you keep swapping between retail ISPs every 3 months, the provider below doesn’t care so long as you keep some sort of service running.
Certainly we ruled out houses completely if they didn’t have FTTC or Cable present when we were previously looking and will definitely be pointing out clearly when we come to sell the broadband speeds available here on both FTTC and Cable.
I’d pay £6499 and not a penny more.
It would be even more interesting to have got an idea of the extra % people would pay for excellent broadband.
£6,500 extra on a £5 million house is almost irrelevant. while on a £200,000 house it’s quite a lot.