Uriah Heap

Phew, I thought this thread might have been deleted as offensive...

Can we add another discussion board to the forum devoted exclusively to the debating of Kirsty's pros and cons? It is clearly a subject of great interest to posters but doesn't really fit into the rest of the discussion?

Barratt's have a web site which too my surprise gives a rough idea of prices. Looking around Essex developments I couldn't easily find ANY flats close to £200,000 so it looks like the price cuts are kicking in pretty quickly.

I recently rented a flat and the bargaining went like this:- Asking price £500 pcm I offer £450 pcm He proposes £475 I say no, but was very charming, praising the flat and being as positive as possible without apearing simple. I wait. He suggests £470. I say no. He suggests £460 conditional on me moving in within a week. I agree. The thing to watch here is that I did nothing apart from genuinely showing interest in his property. I.e., I was a serious buyer. He did all the work on the bargaining. That is how a buyers' market works. I would do what other posters suggest. Put in a very low offer, maybe the price that you wouldn't think twice about paying, and wait. And if you end up paying a bit above your offer that will make the vendor feel better, and why not? It might be worth looking around at other flats and try and get into the same process with them. As I say, the vendors will be doing the work so why not let them take the strain?

I am just down the road in Horsham, and was looking for rental property in April and May. I have just had a look on Rightmove and it looks very similar now to how it looked then. Prices about the same, lots of choice. At least one property that was up for rent 4 months and is still on/on again at the same rent. I think it must be a glitch on the website unless Haywards Heath is very odd. Mind you thinking about it......

Gavin, You couldn't have done any better than you did and it was great to see the possibility of a crash even being considered. But Kirsty Allsop is a professional broadcaster - you wouldn't expect to win a penalty shoot out against David Beckham would you? (Sorry, bad example). And the programme was edited to give her every advantage so you were really up against it. I noticed that someone put a transcript of KA's rant on one of the threads and a later poster thought that it was a wind up!

Thanks Goggles. I have just seen that Miles Shipside on BBC1 saying his report shows that now is a good time to buy......

I am an even bigger problem than Bismarck avitar-wise, being both long dead and fictional. And I predate photography. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I love the random way this forum suddenly lurches off topic. So, here we are discussing a report of falling prices and suddenly someone is off on the internet looking for photos of Bismark! Priceless.

Very comical. Mind you bath sealant is a bugger to remove!

Has anyone else noted the remarkable resemblance between gormless but gorgeous property tart Kirsty Allsop and friend of the rich and famous Monica Lewinsky? Is it possible they are related? Allsop Lewinsky

I think it was Telling Stories, but on another forum, did some calculations that showed that the total number of active participants in the housing market at any one time was very low. About 20,000 I think. It wouldn't necessarily require millions of people to change their sentiment to change the direction of the market. So I think the answer is yes.

I think the relevant Shakespeare reference to the programme is in Julius Ceasar. After doing in the tyrant, Brutus makes a well reasoned argument to the crowd justifying what had been done. As an honourable man he allows Ceasar's friend Mark Anthony to address the crowd as well. What does Mark Anthony do? He gives the famous "Freinds, Romans, Countrymen" speech where he stirs up the crowd with emotion, and generates so much rage that Brutus and the other plotters are forced to flee Rome. At the end of the play, Mark Anthony concedes that Brutus was the noblest Roman of them all, but only after he is safely dead. I suspect that Gavin would suffer much the same fate (metaphorically at any rate) in any future debate with the lovely when she's angry Ms Allsop. Reason and logic are great for making decisions; they are crap tools for debating.

Someone has just posted a transcript of the lovely Kirsty's rantings on the Motley Fool. Written down it sounds really really stupid. But it wasn't written down on the telly and I guess that anyone who wasn't as clued up as the average HPC reader would conclude that she was the voice of conventional wisdom angered by the subversive activities of evil people quite capable of poisoning the water. Anyone who has tried to argue logically and adultly with an angry person will know how useless being right is. The person who is wound up inevitably wins. Having said that, the press release was very well written - I hope it gets picked up on by the media, but I guess it won't.

Kirsty does have some supporters. There is even a fans' website http://www.weluvkirstie.com/

Kirsty's rant was very short of any kind of fact and could easily be shot down by anyone with a nodding aquaintance with the arguments for and against a crash. I don't think that is the point though - emotion will always beat logic on television. I think she probably shored up sentiment for house price increases. And sueing her for libel would only give her the opportunity to do it all again.

Logical and well put.

Its hard to think of any ordinary person who doesn't have some sort of vested interest in the property market. I would say that the average guy in the street is better off if prices fall.

A legal action against Kirsty Allsop would be great fun but I really don't think you would win. To have committed slander she would have had to have actually SAID something. He contribution to the programme was an illogical rant. I am sure you could prove it was stupid, but that isn't a crime.

Personally I couldn't understand Kirsty's point about predicting price falls being illegal in the stock market. Does she think it is some kind of insider trading or something?

The question is that if you were thinking of buying a house, would that programme make you think again? My feeling is that it wouldn't really have much impact one way or the other.

Its a shame that there wasn't more of a debate on the programme - just letting Kirsty Allsop rant unchallenged didn't really get many issues raised.

Don't be too hard on Kirsty; she is totally dizzy but she is gorgeous to look at.