When they became parents Soniya and Olabasi Mamman started to feel uneasy about life in London.
The couple had been happily renting a two bedroom flat in Croydon, but when their son Alex, now one, was born they began to rethink their options.
“Croydon didn’t feel like a safe place to raise a child, too much guns and crime,” said Soniya, 29. “We felt the same about all of London, so we started to think about where else we could go.”
Plan A was to move to Brighton but the couple both work in south London and decided that the daily commute would have been too much.
A friend suggested they look at Kent, with its fast trains and grammar schools. Then fate took a hand. An advert for a development in Sturry, a village on the Great Stour river, three miles north east of Canterbury, popped up on Olabasi’s Facebook timeline. They decided to go and have a look.
“We loved it,” said Soniya.
She and Olabasi, 41, who manages a mental health facility, also loved how the numbers stacked up.
The couple had been paying £1,800 per month for the Croydon flat. They had been saving carefully for seven years and had managed to put aside £50,000 to put towards a deposit on a three bedroom, £383,000 house.
And the developer, David Wilson Homes, made a five per cent deposit contribution of £20,000 because Soniya is a key worker. She works as a receptionist for the NHS.
Their monthly mortgage payments now come in at £1,600pcm. “So we are paying less money for a beautiful, bigger house,” said Soniya. “And it is better than renting because it is ours.”
The couple viewed their house in June, reserved their property that month, and moved in in August. The past couple of months have been spent working, unpacking, and settling in but Soniya is looking forward to exploring the historic, buzzy city of Canterbury and the county. “The whole place is surrounded by sea,” she said.
And the couple have been impressed by how polite and friendly the locals are. “When I get on the bus people will lift seats for me and the buggy,” she said. “It is so nice.”
· Homes at David Wilson Kent’s The Woodlands development, are priced from £214,497 for a 50 per cent share of a two-bedroom home.
