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Ursa Minor

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Everything posted by Ursa Minor

  1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/moneybox/7441635.stm Ouch! UM
  2. Another Pont High alumnus? Greetings! When I was there, there was some movement for a fence to be erected around the entirety of DH, to protect them from the plebs in Ponteland village one imagines. The very idea used to make me cry with laughter - like Ponteland was some hotbed of crime! UM
  3. Are we going to have another crisis in 2 years time or so when all the people currently scrambling around to secure a remortgage, any remortgage are suddenly going to realise that the new deal they secured has hideous tie-ins or other stings in the tail that they ignored out of desperation at the time? UM
  4. I walked past on my way to the dive show on Saturday and it was dead in there from what I could see. The dive show was heaving. Maybe all the EA's should have come to the dive show to do the try dives - they might as well get used to the feeling of being underwater... UM
  5. Just a quick question - during the last crash, what happened to transaction volumes? I can't seem to find any figures. UM
  6. I would reccommend it, if read with a critical mind it's an interesting book although some of it is a bit controversial (mainly the bit about the drop in crime and Roe vs Wade). UM
  7. Yeah, that's one seriously vicious circle. So that means we have a bit of bumping along at the top (that stagnation we were talking about) and then prices begin to drift downwards/fall off a cliff? In the last crash what did agents do about the recalcitrant vendors with their unsold houses sitting on their books making them look bad? Did any withdraw their services? Can they do that within the bounds of the contract? UM
  8. This is what has always baffled me about the stagnation argument. If estate agents need sales turnover to survive, and nothing is budging, surely they are going to put pressure on sellers to lower the price, and hopefully get things moving again. Also, in Freakonomics there was an interesting bit where they talked about real estate agents in the US and their incentives to get the best price for your house for you. To summarise, they found that RE agents sold their own homes for more than equivalent homes they were selling, by being willing to hang on for the right price. In the case of selling other peoples homes (i.e. their job), balancing turnover vs the amount they would make in commission, achieving an increase of say $10,000 on an offer, that commission was too small to make it worth their while, far better (for them) to instead convince the vendor that an offer was a good one that they ought to accept. So how could house prices possibly plateau? Between people who must sell for whatever reason and EA who need turnover in order to survive, surely this pressure must push prices down. No EA wants to be the one with property on their books for months if not years! UM
  9. Thanks everyone for all your replies, links etc. I feel more informed now, if more worried! UM
  10. Forgive my naivete, but I am a bit confused about press reports declaring that rate cuts will get us out of a recession. I mean, if it was that easy, how come we've ever had to suffer a recession? OK, I admit I suspect it is more complicated than they are letting on, but it just seems strange that rate cuts are being paraded as a cure for recession when from where I stand, it seems to be merely palliative and ultimately will not stop a recession biting in the end (albeit somewhat delayed). But I'm not an economist, so what do I know? UM
  11. FYI everyone. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/ques...ime/7142279.stm UM
  12. Thought I'd add a gem which was told to me in May this year by my boss, specifically about my reluctance to buy a house in London: Boss: "What you have to understand, is that London is an international property market now. You have all these wealthy multi-millionaires coming over and buying property in London, so London houses have reached a state of permanently high prices which will only increase." Me: "What, millionaires are buying regular family homes and the like? Why?" Boss: "Well, London is an international city, so they want to live here." Me: "But surely they'll buy s*****y pads in Chelsea, not ordinary houses in ordinary parts of town, let alone the poorer parts?" Boss: "Well, they're getting into buy-to-let aren't they? And that's what you should do. It's the only way you'll ever afford a house!" Me: "But I'd be stretching to buy a studio flat, and if I had a void I'd be done for." Boss: "There's always a huge demand for rentals in London, nobody ever goes without a tenant." At this point I asked to change the subject because we weren't getting anywhere and I was getting rather fed up. UM
  13. Why, thankyou. May I say how nice it is to debate with people who think rather than react? It's true - when my brother was unemployed it seemed like they deliberately were trying to sabotage him half the time. Personally, I think that an answer to the problem might be a bigger involvement of local employers in jobcentres, with real incentives for them to set up apprenticeships, or take on people without experience in order to fill long standing vacancies. I see a lot of comments in the media about employers complaining that many unemployed people are unemployable because of poor literacy, numeracy or a lack of other skills. Well, seeing as we are paying out money anyway, why couldn't a scheme be set up which subsidises the jobless in a training role, the employer gets a cheap employee for say 6 months to a year but in return has to provide training and retain the employee at the end of the subsidised period? Short term it might be expensive, but long term you have useful taxpaying, society contributing independent individuals, rather than permanent drains on the system. Let me give an example using my own career, made possible by some imaginative thinking (by the EU of all people) and then alas destroyed (by the EU also!). I served as a trainee lab technician, paid low wages but I learned skills and was sent day release to college and then university. I left university with no debt, and felt incredibly lucky to do so, and this was the days when the fees were only £1000 per year. Now I have a PhD and am climbing the greasy academic pole. I was given a break and I grabbed it with both hands. There are people who when offered this kind of opportunity will abuse it and there are those who will, like me, pick it up and run with it. What do you do with the truly delinquent? This I don't know. If people refuse to even contemplate the most reasonable offers of work and training, it's difficult to see what sanctions can be applied. Remove their benefits completely, and that could force them into criminality. Not to mention the effect it would have on any children they have. (Some might demand that the children are taken into care, personally I would never wish the care system in this country on any child.) Maybe we would have to accept this as a society as a consequenc of living in a free country, but although I think I am a very tolerant person, it is difficult to want to offer these people the full rights of citizenship when they refuse to contribute to the society that supports them. UM
  14. Sadly I couldn't get the second link to work, but no matter, I catch your drift. You're right of course, the 19th century gives us some excellent examples of truly admirable philanthropy. The problem, to my mind, is that these schemes were limited in scope. There were also the mills and factories whose worker housing were slums and job security was nonexistent. The reality of poverty in the 19th century for a large proportion of the poor was a working life overshadowed by the threat of the workhouse. I cannot really overstate how awful those places were. It's true that the state is not an idea generating engine. Committees rarely are. The advantage of the state involvement in welfare is perhaps that it can apply a good idea (probably taken from the private sector!) on a grand scale, across the country. Yes, there is a level of self interest in terms of catching votes, but that's democracy for you. The private sector doesn't do things without self interest either. I happen to think the NHS is a very fine thing, and I doubt a health care system free at the point of delivery to a whole nation could have arisen under the private sector. Equally, it is difficult to envision the private sector providing social security type safety nets to the whole populace or equality of access to education. That's not to say I am unable to criticise these things. The NHS has any number of problems - a consultant friend of mine once said, the NHS would be a model of efficiency if it weren't for all these bloody sick people. But the NHS's biggest problems stem from govenrment micromanagement. I don't know much about the management of social security but I suspect that a major rethink is needed there. There was a post on this thread about the welfare state allowing companies to pay less than a living wage. This may be true, but I doubt it. If you took away the welfare state, the only way to prevent the lowest social groups sliding into destitution would be to enforce a much higher minimum wage. Which is replacing one set of state interventions with another. There is no perfect answer to this problem. Only under communism is there full employment, and since I don't personally fancy a communist state here in the UK, we have to accept that there will be unemployed people and it is unethical to let them starve on the streets. UM
  15. Do you REALLY believe there were fewer problems before the welfare state? Even a scant reading of the history books would suggest that this isn't the case. Would you support a return to the workhouses? That the current welfare state has serious problems is clear - but surely there is another alternative than abolishing it altogether? UM
  16. Why would she lie about her sex? Reading the blog, I see no reason to assume she isn't female. UM
  17. Could we have the inflation stats and links to the reports on the website? Maybe on the page with the base rates? UM
  18. I've just received an email from a TV tickets website I subscribe to: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mortgage nightmares - Tonight with Trevor McDonald Are you a young working couple struggling to get on the property ladder? Do you already own your own home but finding your mortgage payments too much for you? Have your plans to buy with friends gone horribly wrong? Are you currently facing repossession? If any of the above applies to you then Tonight with Trevor McDonald would like to hear from people willing to take part in a film over the next couple of weeks. Apply here: http://www.beonscreen.com/uk/user/show_det...D=1972&in=e ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign of the times? UM
  19. Well, if it is you and your settings, it's also me and my settings. I tried to add something to the blog last night...no sign of it though! UM
  20. I think it's true to say that he knows very little about the property market but how many people really do? A straw poll of my friends and co-workers (not a good sample I admit) showed that lots of people get into property without knowing anything about how the system works. I think he was under the impression that EAs were professionals by which I mean the traditional definition where there is extensive training, formal qualifications and a professional body. So when the EA told him this stuff, he took it as gospel. UM
  21. No he hasn't signed anything (thank goodness) but the agent put the fear of God into him! I was mad about it - he's a nice guy trying to make a life for himself and his family and some sod is trying to take him for a ride. And he is an intelligent man, just not knowledgable about how the property market works - he can't be unusual. On the basis of what he saw on nethouseprices, he is now considering withdrawing his offer, and looking around again. I think he might avoid using that agent now. I appreciate all the replies - I didn't think it was right when he told me but since I don't work in law or property I couldn't be sure. Apparently the EA told him it was to protect the seller since they take the house off the market. I said I knew that vendors can continue to show the house to other prospective buyers hence the phenomenen of gazumping, so it would be pretty unfair to impose a restriction on buyers, especially when the offer hasn't even been accepted yet. UM [Edits - really bad typing!]
  22. I probably shouldn't suggest this, but I wondered whether the agent thought they could BS a bit because he is foreign. His offer is over the top - I pointed him gently in the direction of nethouseprices and he nearly had an apoplexy! The most that street has achieved to date (in Jan 06) is about 75K less than he has offered and he offered less than the asking price. I'm gently directing him to other websites which might help his knowledge of the property market in this country - I'm taking my time, because I don't want him to feel I'm trying to unduly influence him, any good suggestions gratefully received, especially in the area of the law and conveyancing. UM
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