Right to Buy saw a number of Ceredigion residents make over £80,000 from the sale of their former council homes, figures have revealed.

Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the Right to Buy scheme in 1980, giving council tenants the chance to buy their home for a discounted price.

While popular at the time among many of the new homeowners, the scheme’s legacy has been blamed for the severe lack of social housing available today.

The scheme came to an end in January this year in Wales, 40 years after its inception.

Figures have shown that former council houses bought then resold have made a combined profit of £6.4 billion in real terms since 2000 across the whole of the UK.

In Ceredigion, the biggest profit was made on a former council house bought in September 2003 for £19,500.

It sold three years later for £110,000, giving the owner a profit of £90,500 or £64 a day.

Another property in Ceredigion was bought in 2002, before the housing boom, for £8,700 and sold 11 years later for £94,000, netting the owner more than £85,000.

The largest profit per day on a home was one bought in 2004 for £46,500 and sold in 2007 for £123,000, making a profit of £92 per day of ownership.

Not all sales were success stories however, with one former council house being bought in 2008, at the height of the housing bubble, for £138,950, but sold in 2014 for £135,000, which works out as a real terms price loss of £30,592.

On average, buying a council house netted people in Ceredigion £45,065 in profit, an average of £23 a day.

There wasn’t however, a quick turn around in sales in the county, with owners tending to hold onto their property for a couple of years before selling, with the average days between purchase and sale being 3,308 days, nearly 10 years.

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