62% of People Might Pay More for a House with Superfast Broadband
A new survey of 2,115 UK homeowners has claimed that 62% of respondents would be willing to increase the value of an offer on a house if it was “guaranteed” to deliver “superfast broadband” ISP speeds and 25% of those would increase their offer by £3000-£5000, while 10% said they’d go over £5,000.
The poll, which was conducted by Broadband Choices, found that accessing internet streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now TV) was the main reason people needed a good internet connection (78%), followed by communicating via social media, WhatsApp and email (62%), online shopping (57%) and being able to work from home (25%).
Overall 69% of people said they considered having a “fast broadband connection” as an important factor when choosing a new area to live in. However, access to broadband was often delayed by at least 2-3 weeks after moving into a new home for 46% of respondents, while only 28% had immediate access. Sadly it does take a little time to get a new service activated as most people know, which can increase if a new line install is required.
Unfortunately this survey doesn’t appear to define what it means by “superfast” or “fast” broadband, which without a clear definition can still mean different things to different people when asked. We assume they mean 24Mbps+ or 30Mbps+ but many other people may not share that familiarity and could make a different judgement when responding to the question.
The above caveat is important because 24Mbps+ capable superfast broadband networks are now available to around 96% of premises across the United Kingdom, which makes surveys like this one seem somewhat out-of-date. Indeed it may now be more relevant to ask about the impact of having access to 1Gbps capable “full fibre” (FTTP/H) connections that are currently only available to 7% of premises.
As it stands most of the currently available evidence for the impact of broadband speed on house prices remains fairly anecdotal, although a 2014 study conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE) did claim that property prices increased by an average of around 3% when the available broadband speeds doubled (here). Obviously that’s now 5 years out-of-date too.
Ultimately the decision about how much you pay for a house will always come down to a matter of personal choice, which is of course different for everybody.
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 X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I think at the moment the main thing is that people won’t come to view a house if the owner can’t prove it has an adequate service. No viewers – you’ll have to take a lower price, and the folk who aren’t interested in broadband these days are getting fewer and far between. So to get your price, or even start a bidding war you have to have a decent service.
Have you got supporting evidence that house prices in the B4RN region have increased at a higher rate than market growth for your area? Have you got supporting evidence that people are moving into the B4RN region because of better broadband?
If I ever mnove from one council house to another council house I always checked the address via DSL Checker to ensure FTTC got handback @ 72Mbps and G.fast got handback @ 330. Anything less than that I wouldn’t move!
“WhatsApp and email (62%), online shopping (57%)”
Not sure how superfast makes any difference on those
Agreed on normal email and shopping, although if you streaming video or sending a file to somebody in WhatsApp then more speed can be useful.
I don’t use whats app but streaming vid usually doesn’t use need more than 5mb.
Files I’ll give you.
78% netfix and streaming, the lower percentages are just other things they said and as you say are pretty much irrelevant.
I think a large number of customers don’t even know what they ‘need’, advertising drives perception.
For me connectivity would have a huge impact on a property decision, having been at the bottom of the spectrum forever, I’d not be likely to move to anywhere by choice without proof of service.
Hi Martin,
sorry no, we don’t bother collecting evidence, we all know it makes sense. You can mess about with statistics as much as you like, but a house with good broadband is becoming essential nowadays. We just know it.
I know I would simply not consider a house with poor broadband. I have not considered what my threshold would be though – maybe a reliable 30Mbps would be the cutoff point for me? 30Mbps is enough for most people today but maybe not tomorrow. I have been in the same house for 20+ years and was stuck on 3Mbps ADSL until a couple of years ago – my son was still at home and it was a nightmare as he was into gaming. Now I have about 70Mbps down and 100Mbps up via point-to-point radio which is quite adequate at the moment. I do work from home from time to time but my home working only requires small bandwidth – maybe 4Mbps just about is workable for that. For work I use screen sharing with Skype for Business quite a lot. I don’t have to download/upload many large files for work.
For domestic purposes I don’t really bother with 4K TV (20Mbps) as my eyesight is crap and don’t notice the difference really – but many people do want to stream 4K. Cloud gaming will become a much bigger app for a lot of households I believe – not important for me though. Geforce Now or whatever it is called requires 50Mbps for 1080p 60FPS. Imagine a family household with a few kids playing games, Mom watching 4K TV and Dad downloading lots of porn, you can see how the bandwidth requirements can stack up.
Personally I do use cloud backup and Usenet moderately heavily so appreciate a reasonable connection – especially upload speed. A few people also use my Plex server so upload is good for that.
Even if broadband is not important for you, you do need to consider the implications when you come to sell your house.
If CDS and Gigaclear ever sort themselves out then I should end up with FTTH but in the medium term this isn’t important for me – but it is nice to see a plan moving forwards. I think it is hard to predict what bandwidth will be needed by family households in the future but 24Mbps isn’t going to cut it for many family households with data hungry kids.
Of course, the answer is to kick all the kids off cloud gaming and get them riding cycles and kicking footballs…..who am I kidding……
We’ve talked about moving house in the past, and my wife used to scoff that “Oh, you won’t move there, the broadband is too slow”.
When I tell her how much we both depend on the internet – she now gets it – any potential look at a new house always comes with a postcode lookup to see what services are like. I’ve seen some beautiful houses near us, but with 1-2Mb ADSL only? Forget it, absolute zero chance of that happening.
This is where the low offer comes in but i’m not sure they’d take a 40k drop so the buyer can get fttp installed, that’s if the potential buyer is prepared to wait for a year to get it.
It’s not even for the current user, resale will plummet
Data needs are only going up
Personally i do not see “superfast” and “ultrafast” as either quick or beneficial in the medium to long term. My minimum requirement would be 1Gb symmetrical with a minimum speed guarantee of 75% – currently i am on a best effort fttc 80/20 service and quite frankly for the money its rubbish. FTTPOD is an option but i do not want to be tied to the Open Reach network- the installation costs are not the sticking point , the cost of the service is once it has been installed is as the various providers by and large do not offer a symmetrical service and in the case of Cerberus, who i think do, it is hideously expensive compared to some of the altnet providers who are a lot cheaper. Apologies for any inaccuracies as i am very ignorant about most of this stuff. Basically if the property does not have FTTP then i am not interested.
@Rick – You have high requirements that lock you out of a lot of properties. What do you plan to do with all that bandwidth today if you don’t mind me asking? I am finding my 70Mbps down and 100Mbps up quite fast enough (for now) but there are just two of us in the house. I am sure that many folks will want 200Mbps+ in the not too distant future and the 24+ Mbps superfast target is not good enough.
I do download films but mostly 720P and 1080P so usually not more than about 10GB in size.
F
@Rick oliver i agree we live in 21 century and other countries have almost 90% fibre coverage we deserve 1gbps connection why should we pay more for garbage fttc with non existant upload speeds if you can get true fibre connection cheaper in this shitty country everything is false. My suggestion is to move to other areas like pembrokeshire they’ve got 1gbps for £30 per month without phone line or york places with gigafast vodafone connection. Enough of this fucking dialups here. they advertise talktalk 75mbps and i get 60mbps with shityy upload speeds i mean that’s some fucked up shit.
@Rick oliver i agree we live in 21 century and other countries have almost 90% fibre coverage we deserve 1gbps connection why should we pay more for garbage fttc with non existant upload speeds if you can get true fibre connection cheaper in this damn country everything is false. My suggestion is to move to other areas like pembrokeshire they’ve got 1gbps for £30 per month without phone line or york places with gigafast vodafone connection. Enough of this poop dialups here. they advertise talktalk 75mbps and i get 60mbps with crap upload speeds i mean that’s some not normal stuff.