JonoP

Ye gods. It really is not this hard. Most of the 'immigrants' that all the idiots that have posted on this thread fear so much have come from Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe, at the turn of the century, had a much lower standard of living, and hence lower wages, than the UK. Soon, Eastern Europe will catch up with Western Europe in terms of standards of living. At which point the Eastern European immigrants will chose to stay at home. Which will leave us with some immigrants from Africa/Asia plus our legal obligations in terms of taking asylum seekers. These numbers are not huge, and I can live with them. The people that moan about immigrants are: Probably BNP sympathisers Probably not racist per se, just xenophobic Probably failures in their careers/lives and looking for someone to blame

Prove it.

Lol, elegantly phrased. I do agree that in my mind Eastern European immigration is generally preferable to immigration from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Africa etc. That said, if the people immigrating to the UK have useful skills, are employable and happy to live in a secular society, I really do not care where they come from. Most of the people who moan about ‘immigrants stealing their jobs’ are just the dross of society anyway. Blaming immigrants means that it is ‘not their fault’ that they have a crap job/no job, just like it was ‘not their fault’ that they did badly at school etc.

Yes Chris. Your politics are fairly clear

Duh! Yes! Aren’t you?

What an utterly stupid post

Every time house prices start dropping the property industry rush out panic stories about rents shooting up. It happened in 2004, again in 2008 and low and, lo and behold, here we go again. These type of stories have now become a leading indictor of house prices dropping........

Yeah, leaves his 'eight year cycle' theory (or however long it was) looking rather tatty really. After a while it gets boring being proved right all the time

Yeah, seems to have vanished. It is not on really, the market is now trending down and he has left the forum before we could have fun at his expense

Another cracking article in The Age this morning. Looks like the mainstream Aussie media may be working it out. http://www.theage.com.au/business/property/dwelling-upon-investment-20110522-1eyty.html?skin=text-only Although, there was an article on the prior page written by Natalie Pulchalski. She is one of those vapid, frankly pointless bints with a silly haircut that blather on about 'the market' in newspaper property sections each week. There was one who used to write for The Times, I forget her name. She was deputy assistant trainee property cub reporter or something and the her most significant article each week seemed to be the one that detailed which 'celebrities' were moving house. A useful asset to humankind, I am sure you will agree. Anyhow, this Natalie bird is cast from a similar mold. Her article this week was forced to report once again on the ongoing plunge in Melbourne property auction sales. The results last week were appallingly bad, even after the ‘positive massaging’ agents are widely rumored to apply the figures before reporting them. So, for ‘positive quotes’ the intrepid newshound Natalie was forced to resort to speaking to ‘Buyers Advocates’. Now, these are people who are employed by house purchasers to help them navigate the auction process and get a good deal. These are also people who make absolutely zero money if no one is buying houses. Guess what? All of these ‘buyers advocates’ feel that now is ‘a great time to buy’. Not one of them said ‘I would hang on if I were you, prices have dropped 6% in the last quarter and are still heading south. You will save a lot of money by delaying your purchase’. Funny that. The whole situation basically sums up the sheer stupidity of the Australian property market. Dumb punters were paying these disingenuous ‘Buyers Advocate’ snake oil merchants for advice on how to ‘buy at a fair price’ whilst at the time these same ‘Buyers Advocates’ were ramping the market as hard as they could to drive up the same prices that they were supposed to be reining in. Marvelous. Only in Australia.

I do not think that the LinkedIn price is too extreme. They make their money in two main areas, B2B marketing and recruitment. These are HUGE markets, and if LinkedIn captures even a small share of these markets they will be quids in. They have the potential to revolutionize and dominate both of these markets. Whether or not they actually pull it off of course is a different matter. But no stock is ever a dead cert. As for dot com bubbles. Hmmm. I would hate to have bought Amazon back in those dot com bubble days. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=amzn;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=; Or Salesforce when they floated http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CRM+Interactive#symbol=crm;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=; or Apple http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#symbol=aapl;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=; or Google when they floated http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=GOOG+Interactive#symbol=goog;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=; Or Rackspace when they floated http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=GOOG+Interactive#symbol=goog;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=; etc The point being, a lot of technology companies fail. And they do not, as a rule, pay dividends. However, if they make it big, they tend to make it very, very big.

Hmm. Clueless Sparrow. In your delusion, you appear to think that your misguided views are mainstream on this forum. They are not. I laugh out loud as you spout your conspiracy theorist junk and then refer to the wider public as ‘sheeple’ Your posts reek of jealousy, disenfranchisement and failure. People like you and your cohort of nutter friends are ruining this form.

Heh heh heh. Who would have thunk it? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13435876 The media have already started sputtering about the unjustness of it all. An ABC reporter smugly pointed out that last time the banks had problems borrowing money the government guaranteed their loans. What he is probably too thick to realise is that the governments of other countries, such as Ireland, also ‘underwrote’ their banks loans. That worked well for them….. I have not seen any data that compares Aussie banks liabilities with GDP. That would probably be quite an interesting data point. The media is getting increasingly pessimistic over here. A couple of people have even started daring to speculate what would happen if China 'slows down'. And house prices, auction sales and mortgage lending are all going down like crack wh@re on a lottery winner. It is most amusing.

I had to chuckle when I read this story. It would appear that a 'property investor' has been shot by the father of one of his tenants. I love the way the article tries to paint him as some form of saint, saying how he was 'turning a rundown slum into a model community' I suspect the reality was that he was trying to make a quick buck by evicting people in the style of a latter day Rachman. Oh well. One down. Many millions to go . Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/detroit-murder-suspect-charged-20110515-1eobb.html#ixzz1MVAHOMIh UNITED States police have arrested and charged a man with the murder of a Melbourne man who was shot dead outside his block of flats in Detroit after a dispute with a tenant over rent. The victim, 45-year-old Greg McNicol, was shot dead on May 7 outside the block of flats he owned while arguing with a woman he wanted to evict, according to The Detroit News. Witnesses said they saw a black Chevrolet pull up and a man get out, who fired one shot and then drove off. Police arrested a 62-year-old man, Freddie Young, on Friday. He is the father of the woman McNicol was trying to evict. Young appeared in Detroit's 36th District Court on Saturday, charged with first-degree murder. According to The Detroit News, McNicol had bought the 10-unit block of flats in February after visiting Detroit last year. His plan was to renovate the building, which had fallen into disrepair. McNicol moved to the US about 12 years ago but visited Australia regularly. He had married a Brazilian-born woman after a previous marriage in the US failed, his sister Karen McNicol told The Age. Ms McNicol said her brother's wife had talked about his passion for the building project in Detroit. ''She said she'd never seen him as happy as he was. It was just the best time of his life,'' Ms McNicol said. Flinders MP Greg Hunt, a high school friend of Mr McNicol, promised to lobby Detroit mayor Dave Bing to finish renovating the dilapidated building. ''The legacy we want to create is to make sure his vision of turning a rundown slum into a model community is completed,'' Mr Hunt told The Age last week. Tenants described the building as a ''rat trap'' before Mr McNicol bought it and started renovations Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/detroit-murder-suspect-charged-20110515-1eobb.html#ixzz1MVAxjh7k

Very quiet on the Aussie front recently. I note that auction sales rates continue to decline. There were two amusing articles in The Age yesterday. They were both written by market ‘analysts’. One claimed that the market was ‘slowing at the top end but buoyant at the bottom end’. The next article, on the following page, claimed that the market was ‘buoyant at the top end and slowing at the bottom end’ Great to see that these clued up geniuses have such a great understanding around what is happening with the market. There was a pundit on the TV last night speculating that property investors might lose some of their negative gearing benefits. He suggested that investors with four or more properties may be hit by the loss of the benefit. In a disappointing turn of events, the prediction did not come to pass when the budget was announced. Good to see the topic being talked about though. On the subject of negative gearing, Terry Ryder wrote a sickeningly biased and self-serving article in the Australian the other week. The guy is a knob. There are holes the size of brazil in all his arguments, but I cannot be bothered to list them all. This guy is (if memory serves me correctly) the guy that Bardon (where IS he??) buys ‘investment advice’ from.

Errr, if you want to keep getting benefits you apply fo jobs you know you will not get....

Hah hah, am I correct in thinking that the Spanish banks have recently been forced to mark to market their bank repos a little more stringently than they once did? And now their bad debt rate has shot up. Quel surprise……….

Heh heh, the few remaining spikey haired wonders that are still employed today probably 'learnt their trade' during the boom at the turn of the decade. Thus the only sales techniques they ever developed were learnt in a rising market. As they are (with a few notable exceptions, such as Mildura) as thick as pigsh!te, they have probably not yet learnt that these 'tactics' will not work in a falling market.....

Is there not some rule saying that foriegn investors can invest in new build properties but not existing stock? Also, Perth is classic. Everytime I hear about the 'housing shortage' in Australia I think about the mile after mile after mile of developments you pass through as you drive north out of Perth.

Hang in there. When I was 22 I was earning 3 quid an hour (mid nineties), When I was 25 it was about 5.80 an hour. I now earn double digit multiples of that amount. But it was the experience that I got in my early twenties that set me up. And to be honest, I work a lot less hours now than I did when I was in my mid/late twenties.

That is an interesting viewpoint. What is the tax situation around inheritance in Aus? I have read a couple of articles saying that the ‘bulk’ of the boomer population are now rapidly approaching retirement. Thus over the course of the next few years a lot of these people will be looking to start drawing on assets they have accumulated during their working career. This segment of the population hold the bulk of the ‘investment properties’ (sorry, cannot help myself with the punctuation). As they move in to retirement, the attractions of negative gearing reduce (assuming that they pay less tax). Thus the assumption is that they will become net sellers of property. What do you think?

BUYERS are deserting the housing market at a pace that threatens a slump in housing prices and a risk to the economic outlook. The number of new housing loans approved by the banks dropped 5.6 per cent to a 10-year low in February, after a similarly sharp drop in the previous month, The Australian reports. The Queensland floods were not to blame, because the number of new housing loans fell in all states. Among the biggest falls was a 10.1 per cent drop in New South Wales. The buyer retreat comes as the stock of unsold houses mounts. Figures compiled by property analysts SQM Research show there are now 356,600 properties on the market, which is almost 50 per cent more than a year ago. "It is clear now that the sudden drop in finance approvals in the new year is not to do with the flooding, but is rather due to the Reserve Bank's interest rate rise in November, which was the straw that broke the camel's back," SQM chief executive Louis Christopher said. He said the fall in the demand for housing was more severe than occurred during the global financial crisis and should erode house prices by more than 5 per cent. Mr Christopher said reported auction clearance rates of between 50 and 60 per cent in the major capitals could not be believed, since the results of half the houses put up for auction each weekend are not recorded. Agents with unsuccessful auctions have an incentive not to report them. The slump threatens to undermine Budget calculations for the Government, which is counting on a rapid return to growth in the next financial year. The number of loans for new homes slumped 12 per cent in February and has dropped almost 36 per cent in the past three months. Home building is a key economic sector influencing both the health of manufacturing and consumption. Read more: http://www.news.com.au/money/property/buyer-retreat-spells-slump-in-home-prices/story-e6frfmd0-1226035067289#ixzz1InDb8zMc

Ummmm, yesssss...... All those 'cashed up' punters from the UK, Ireland, the US etc. Coming over here and spending the massive profits they secured from the sale of their properties back home? Or maybe it is all those ‘cashed up’ Indian students that are coming over here to do hair dressing courses? Anyhow, it does not really matter. The point is that banks in Australia make more mortgages each month than banks in the UK. Yet Australia only has one third of the population. That is deeply weird.

And no bankers.......

So, it would appear that more mortgages are issued Australia each month than in the UK. And Australia has 1/3rd of the population of the UK. Interesting. I wonder if any of the FORTY FIVE THOUSAND loans issued in a BAD month in Australia are going to ‘investors’ speculating on the price of housing…….