‘Put Porthmadog on the Monopoly board’ say Times newspaper and estate agents

The town of Porthmadog in the north-west of Wales should be included on a redesigned pandemic-era Monopoly board, according to the Times newspaper and estate agents Savills.

The newspaper and estate agents teamed up to ask what would Monopoly look like if the game were based on today’s property market where many have fled London for rural parts of the British Isles.

They said that “cheap-as-chips Whitechapel Road has been swapped for the harbour town of Porthmadog in north Wales (£196,280), where players would make a fortune in hotel rents — it’s the tourist gateway to Snowdonia, the Llyn peninsula and Portmeirion.”

Monmouth is also suggested as another square on the board. “One of the features of the market this year is the discovery of the Welsh countryside,” Lucian Cook, a director of residential research for Savills, told the newspaper.

The property market has surged in the west of Wales due to the pandemic, as buyers flee urban areas in search of more rural areas where they can work from home.

Wales has been one of the prime property hotspots for those moving to rural areas, with 12 local authorities in Wales making up the top 20 biggest house price rises in Wales and England since the start of the pandemic, according to estate agency Hamptons.

The Times explained their rationale for redesigning the Monopoly board, saying that while sales of the game soared during lockdown, “the locations on the original UK version of the board game seem woefully out of date”.

“The most prestigious addresses, Mayfair and Park Lane, no longer seem so desirable — they’re full of mostly empty flats owned by overseas buyers, and those markets flatlined during the pandemic as foreign squillionaires stopped travelling,” they said.

“The results reflect the pandemic-era flight from cities to the coast and country. So the new Mayfair is St Mawes, an exclusive fishing village on the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall where the average sold price between August 2020 and 2021 was £1,057,353.”

The cards involved in the game would also reflect the new pandemic flight to rural areas, with the New Chance card reading ‘Inappropriate posting on village WhatsApp’ and Go to Jail replaced by ‘Return to London with your tail between your legs’.