The Dean

You sure that's not an out-of-date view?

I'm not aware of more than a few pockets of the UK where property is still rising in price. My part of the country is swamped with 'For Sale' boards, which was never the case until recently.

The lenders simply haven't any cash to lend, following the credit and sub-prime crises which have spilled over from the US to other markets globally.

pinebluffvariant

I guess it is marginally out of date. Some people indeed are feeling the wrath but the south is still in denial. Rightmove's recent arguably questionable figures claim a recent rise which adds to the confusion.

Nice to see people finally seeing sense after several years of craziness...And more and more properties are coming onto the market every day where I live outside London.

pinebluffvariant

It sickens me that Gordon Brown is applauded for his economic competence when fundementally all he was doing was riding a global economic boom and like everyone was spending money left right and center when he should have been saving for leaner times.

It doesn't help that he removed mortgages from the inflation index. What so no-one in the UK has a mortgage?

And don't get me started about the selling of 60% of our Gold 10 years ago for peanuts compared to what it is worth now.

He's really shafted us over. :curse: GGGgggrrrr!

Meow

Gordon's bigest problem, apart from his arrogance, is that he likes to meddle. He & Ed Balls made fiscal matters way more complicated that they needed to.

When they first came to office, I was a regular visitor to The Treasury and made many heated discussion with Ed, particularly regarding pensions and investments. With hindsight I was right.

FWIW when you first meet Gordon he is charm personified, but he is ruthless in getting his own way. I suppose you have to be to get that far in politics....



But if you want to talk about selling off public assets, hadn't you better slate the Tories for selling for so much privitisation. No one asked me how I felt about them selling Water/Gas/etc that belonged to the nation.

pinebluffvariant

Tories were before my time but blaming them for the actions of their predecessors is like blaming people today for the slave trade. Unless their mistakes are based on party policies that still exist - but they seem so much like Labour now. Out with Labour I say.

Well anyway I am glad to be moving out of here - like so many other people - they call it the brain drain. Nice to know my tax money is not ending up in his grubby hands.

pinebluffvariant

Not heated enough clearly. What was your job back then?

arbroath_abroad

meow: friend of the stars.......

g18c

I recently went through with a mortgage pre-approval, for a large 1.8M 2 bed apartment in JLT i worked out by time i had paid all commission, transfer fees, land registration fees, annual maintenance, mortgage fee, life insurance, 10% deposit, i would be looking at the best part of 300,000dhs at an absolute minimum. That would pay my rent for quite a few years yet and it opened my eyes to a few things like being told by an estate agent that the discovery gardens are apparently finished but being released block by block and could take over a year to handover! I think i will wait to see what the future has in store, or maybe its sensible to buy off plan to avoid all the commission which quickly adds up.

Meow

Something similar to now.

Meow

Well if the Tories (all 16/17 years of them) were before your time, meaning you don't know what they did, you aren't qualified to comment, are you?

typical

The clouds are gathering. My view is that a stand-off exists between sellers unwilling to compromise their capital gains, and buyers expecting prices to fall. At some point, one or the other party is going to need to move first - and I don't personally think it'll be the buyers, especially with credit availability the way it is.

The rightmove index - which I believe measures asking prices rather than sale prices - is a case in point. Propertybee is interesting...

typical

As for the original point...

If the cost of servicing debt and maintaining a property is lower than rent, then everything else being equal it'd be better to buy. Of course everything else isn't equal and you take a risk on a change in the value of the asset you're buying, over the ownership period. That's the risk. As Eeyore says, don't fall into the trap of assuming it's a 'right' that house prices always rise. They don't.

Inselaffen

well it looks like Labour have started on a programe of re-nationalisation.

privatisation was a good idea. just needed more controls to be placed on the privatised companies.

typical

Oh hardly. They'd have done almost anything to have got a private sector buyer for NR - the beardy one just pushed too far. ("Ok, so we'll get all the upside, if things are ok, but if things go bad you can deal with the downside. Oh, and we'll pay ourselves a great deal of money for the right to use the Virgin name, too. How does that sound?")

Eeyore

But you also have to factor in the rapidly-growing number of sellers who, due to overcommitment, need to sell *now*, and the fact that credit availability is not what it was. More and more lenders are finally becoming more selective about who they lend to and how much they lend, and you can be sure that Egg's removal of credit facilities from 160,000 "high-risk" credit card customers isn't going to be an isolated incident.

The days of lenders throwing money at anyone and everyone to allow them to meet whatever ridiculously inflated prices sellers were demanding seem to be ending. They could even be over already.