Thursday, Oct 18, 2007
A few factors to consider
Times Online: Opening bids: Why the Government must do something about Britain’s empty properties
Sub-prime slime is oozing out everywhere from the US -where will it spread next?
Posted by peter @ 09:41 PM (1146 views) Add Comment
23 Comments
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1. stillthinking said...
I don't want to worry anyone but the house price has obviously started months ago and now we are heading into a recession. Thats the problem. I am from West London and in Ealing one of the major shops and another not so major I suppose are in the process of closing i.e. boarded up closed shops in moderately wealthy Ealing with house prices 10x national average.
Tonight I was in a Chinese restaurant in Acton (near Ealing), not the best in the world, reasonably pricey, £3 for egg fried rice etc, but the best in the area so all the locals go there.
It was empty, totally empty. The owner was sitting by the window just staring outside.
The money dried up and so have we. Look around. Property crash is old news, it was even on the front page of the Times today. We are f*cked now I think. Nobody can spend and everybody is in debt.
Stupid UK Labour voting PLC finally got a well deserved reward. Thanks for wasting my tax money.
2. planning4acrash said...
Not me, I'm not screwed, I forsaw this 4yrs ago, got another qualification to recession proof my career (and get me doing work I love) and I'm getting a new job with a 30% payrise in 2weeks, have no debt (except student loan) which I'm paying off within the next 9months. Not everybody is screwed by this affair, the young who didn't get a leg up onto the housing market and those who are well skilled will be the new middle class and neuveau riche, along with the bankers who will short on and benefit from any market crash. New Liebour will (in my mind unfortunately, for lack of opposition) be the first head to roll. Tony got out just in time, tho if he had got out 1yr earlier, Brown would have won a landslide election. But then again, had he got the balls to assasinate Tony at his weakest, he would have had the leadership qualities that he now shows to lack, so that is just a hypothetical point which assumes that labour would have done well had brown been a different person!
p.s. anybody who knows any students, tell them that they are the next sacrificial lambs, student loans up from 2.4 to 4.8% this year, because they track RPI. If you are a parent, help em pay it off by lending them the cash before its too late, if you can, because most young people will only be paying back enough to cover interest repayments if they are lucky enough to earn enough to do that, there's no reason why RPI won't be closer to 6 or 7% by next year!
3. whiteknight said...
good stuff guys. these posts are going up in length and detail.
4. autopilotengage said...
I'm with planning4, i have debt, but only 0% on balance transfers, and a 5.94% until "paid off" deal as well, won't get a better rate than that anywhere at the mo unsecured, and the 5.94% won't change if inflation surges so that would be eroded. I have more than enough share options to offset my debt even on the worst market crash predictions, which by the way i don't think is going to suffer too much in the next couple of years as lots of the liquidity moving out of property will find it's way to the stock market in one way or another, i work for a company which has zero debt and a relatively recession proof business model too, i "own" no property, or rather the bank owns no property on my behalf. Things have been this way for some time, i'm ready.
5. Madtobuyatthemoment said...
Yep, same here in rich old Bath, probably the wealthiest place in the UK after Knightsbridge and Chelsea. Loads of shops closing down, the unit our office is in is half empty and has been for months. All of the teenage shoppers evaporated months ago and hideously overpriced houses here have been on the market for months, some of them a year or more. And we've got a homeless problem like you wouldn't believe, which makes the site of empty houses even more morally outrageous. If Bath's in the doldrums, what's the rest of Britain like?
6. lvmreader said...
All the Govt has to do is make house price transactions transparent, apply the same anti-fraud measures to Estate Agents as to Stock Brokers and the problem will be "fixed" in a matter of 6 months.
7. taffee said...
So the shortage of property myth is exposed then....they made it seem like there are no properties full stop.
Or is it that legislation to put people in them would cause a slump in property values?
So if the market was supported by speculation(56% of mortgages last year were investment) and there are 840,000 empty properties it kind of looks a bit dicy does it not?
8. Dave The Box said...
I'm with planning4 too. I have no debt whatsoever. While all the sheeple were taking advantage of low interest rates and high house prices by MEWing and spending like crazy, I was using the extra cash to pay off my mortgage! Everyone thought I was stupid and should have been "living for the day".
Who's stupid now? I live rent free with no money worries.
Having said that, I would, however, like house prices to come down though, as when I come to upsize a little, I won't have to pay extortionate estate agents fees and stamp duty, and also the money I'll need to bridge the gap will be less. High house prices benefit no-one but the government and people who downsize or sell-to-rent.
9. Seanb303 said...
anybody see the truth about property on bbc 2 last night?
for the first few minutes it looked like it was going to be crapp
but it actually turned out to be really good , they are showing another episode next week
watch it if you can
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/7027874.stm
10. Slappyrick said...
Good on you, P4C. I'm feeling pretty smug too - no debt, and S2R in 2005. But I'm worried about good friends of mine who made naive - not greedy, but naive - decisions, and might be about to get badly burned.
Don't mind me asking, but what's the job that you love?
11. su said...
Congratulations, P4ac on getting a well paid job you enjoy.
There seems to be a lot of talk recently about redundancies. The BBC are talking about cutting back on staff and a friend who works for Edinburgh Council was telling me they're reducing staff by natural wastage.
12. taffee said...
Bearing in mind the government find out immigration and crime numbers using survey samples???????Just how accurate are the employment figures?
13. Orwell said...
Property Snake up 1000 in the last two days.....
14. su said...
Taffee.
I don't suppose the employment figures even look at full-time students who want a small part-time job and can't get one.
15. Thirtytoforty said...
Nor me! We saw this ridiculous situation building 4 years ago too. Fro me it was the final straw when I read an article detailing that we must not worry about borrowing as we coudl pass on the mortgage to our kids etc. That was the final straw and proved that this was just running away with itself. So, whilst all my friends bought houses and reminded me how rich they were, I paid a low rent, watched what I spent and along with my lovely girlfriend, stash a couple of k in the bank every month! We will watch from the sidelines and judge when to buy that dream property WITHOUT overstrethcing ourselves.
Good luck guys and glas - if you went aginst the grain then take strength in your own judgement!
16. Tricky Dicky said...
To Planning4 etc: Qualifications, skills, being good at your job etc do not make you recession or redundancy-proof. I speak from experience, both me and my many friends, most with post grad qulaifications, lots of skills and experience who have been made redundant at least once over the last 20 years I've been in the job market. When you get the chop, it seldom has anything to do with you personally, and, if there are no jobs, there are no jobs. Remember, ther are billions of people on this planet - there is always someone better skilled, more motivated, willing to work for less than you.
17. uncle tom said...
I cannot understand why the government does not put pressure on the owners of empty properties - imposing double council tax on any property that is not someone's principal residence would be easy to do and popular - is it that too many MP's have more than one house...??
18. taffee said...
I would love to see the statistics of MPs and boe comittee property investments over the years
19. Lierbag said...
'Not me, I'm not screwed'
Yes you are.
Hasn't anyone here ever bothered to read the US government's 'Hirsch Report'? If not, take a look at Wikipedia.
"The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."
Has anyone noticed any 'viable mitigation' options - apart from military action against oil producing nations and land grabs on Antarctica - being initiated recently?
20. Drewster said...
P4C and Autopilot, can you tell us what your recession-proof jobs are? All I can think of are what brokers traditionally call "defensive stocks", things like utilities, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and weapons. Any other ideas?
21. inbreda said...
I think it would make interesting reading Taffee.
Nice one p4ac - I STR'ed (way too early - but better early than late as I saw it at the time) and have started a credit reference and debt recovery company, which I hope will boom in the downturn. Here's to the future that "nobody could have predicted"
22. planning4acrash said...
Yer Inbreda. I think next time that you should time STR ing by what the stock markets are doing. The early warning signs are clear to see with high mortgage to earning ratio's, etc, get your finger on the buzzer when interest rates start an upwards rout, fire sale when bankers start slowly selling shares in property companies and mortgage lenders and if gold starts going up, because if shares are being sold and money is going into gold, then you know what's going on. Northern Rock fell slowly from Christmas to late summer as bankers quietly proft took and prepared short positions, then the cat came out of the bag and the BBC triggered the race to the bottom and the slow boiled frog jumped out of the water and it was too late for novice investors to profit take and too late for many BTL's to sell at a decent price. All appears very well orchestrated to me. Good lessons for the next boom, which I intend to participate in!!
23. Tricky Dicky said...
To Drewster, I cerrtainly wouldnt confuse the 'defensive stock' status of biopharm with any actual job security for the axe-fodder who work in these companies: Every biopharm I know regularly goes postal on its own workforce - I even had one ex-colleague (ex because of the inevitable culls) who had made a very successful financial strategy getting jobs in successive biopharms where the management had (metaphorically) got themselves tooled up and were salivating at the prospect of redecorating the walls red.... For a reality check on what it is like to work in biopharm check out:
http://www.biofind.com/Rumor/