Buy to Let offload and later FTB age, both factors

The australian authorities seem to be letting the house collapse get underway, but it seems that there has been the same sub-prime liar loans, false documents, interest only etc, as the USA originally, so their banking system must be heavily exposed to losses and I guess australian mortgage backed securities are no longer sound. Australian central bank doing emergency rate cuts and keeping QE a policy option. There doesn't seem to be a large observable decline in the aus dollar against gbp though I wonder why. There has been a loss against us dollar. Its a bit weird to see a genuine new one emerge. In fact i worked with an australian guy about 3 or 4 years ago and said the collapse for australia was coming and he should read steve keen. Needless to say he bought last year "at the top"

Sentiment seems to be falling."UK house prices grew at the slowest annual rate for nearly six years in January, according to the Nationwide. The lender said price growth 'almost ground to a complete halt', with prices up by just 0.1% from a year earlier, down from a rate of 0.5% in December." There's a graph of prices changes over last decade from Halifax and Nationwide and a nice little wigdget to play with showing the different affordability rates across country.

I expect the RLA will be saying that landlords will have to increase rents to make up for the depreciation they are seeing on their properties.

Councillor Nesil Caliskan, the 30 year-old council leader of the glorious republic of Enfiled has called for Right to Buy to be axed. Far too feeble in my view - in order to reverse the policy they need to be bought back into public ownership (with a 60% discount. of course). Just imagine the effect this would have on house prices.

Great to see further evidence of what nonsense the rents-rising-as-costs rise is. The Residential Landlords Association is sticking to its guns though! Any minute now rents will start picking up, even faster now to catch up the unexplained lost ground... Interesting to compare cost rises in food due to sterling devaluation. Profit margins on food are low as it is a competitive market, prices had to rise when input costs rose. Supermarkets would have empty shelves if they tried to pay their suppliers the same. The boot's on the other foot for landlords though, if they try to pass on their costs they'll have empty homes. And reduced costs, e.g. plummeting mortgage interest costs, certainly didn't feed through into lower rents.

“Many landlords will have been looking to offset the government’s punitive tax regime by raising rents. However, the uncertainty surrounding Brexit has forced the vast majority to forfeit this to maintain a steady income.” Time to look at ratcheting up recurring property taxes in general now that the grown-ups' predictions of no adverse effect on prices have come to pass? ARLA et al are strangely quiet on this one. Imagine if they do manage to get the tax rise overturned, will they immediately drop rents? Luckily there's no political will to do this for the foreseeable future, who are landlords going to vote for - Corbyn?