Fulham top for young professionals

The most popular areas for aspiring young professionals to snap up a home have been named, from Jesmond and Didsbury to Cardiff and Hove. Young urbanites have been flocking to buy homes in south-west London over the last year, with Fulham identified as the most popular place in the country for young professionals, research from Lloyds TSB showed. South-west London holds a particular allure for this sector of the population, with Wimbledon, Clapham and Battersea making the top 20 list of the most popular young professional hotspots, along with edgier, up-and-coming suburbs like Brixton, Streatham and Tooting. Hove and central Brighton on the Sussex coast are the only areas outside London in the 20 most favoured places by young careerists. The research looked at home sales made to professionals aged between 25 and 44 in the year to February 2012, using Land Registry figures as a base. It also named the most popular areas for young professional home buyers by region across England and Wales, and found that Didsbury in south Manchester is the biggest young professional hotspot outside London and the South East, in 23rd place. Jesmond in Newcastle has the biggest concentration of young professionals in the North, while Broomhill and Fulwood in Sheffield have the biggest in the Yorkshire and Humberside region, and West Bridgford in Nottingham is the hotspot of the East Midlands. Lloyds TSB housing economist Nitesh Patel said the areas which came out best in the study tended to have the types of amenities which would pull in affluent young professionals as well as close links to cities. He said: "Places like Fulham, Wimbledon and Wandsworth are quite central and have amenities like good pubs and restaurants which would attract young professionals, whose peer groups already live in these areas. Didsbury is quite similar in many ways to parts of south-west London, as are Brighton and Hove." The CF11 postcode area in Cardiff is the most popular choice in Wales for young professionals, which takes in parts of the city centre as well as well-heeled suburbs like Pontcanna with its cafes, pubs and parkland, which is also within easy reach of BBC Wales. With an average price tag of £186,556, young professionals there could buy four times as many houses as they could in Fulham, where typical prices stand at £782,588. Home buyers in this area of Cardiff only pay a 1% premium to live there compared with average property prices in the surrounding area, while those in Didsbury pay a much steeper 56% extra for a home in the leafy northern suburb.