GBdamo

That is not true, you can afford the tax to pay for the services. What you, and I cannot afford is the other 60% of the bill which is solely there to keep the dole queues down and the proles voting labour. If Sir Robert Mugabe (Queenies not taken his knighthood back has she yet?) did this it would be, quite rightly, called election rigging by an 'outraged' BBC.

Yes, but the public sector is paid for by the private sector. The servant is now earning more than the master can pay. Something WILL give.

There you go again... Just kiddin. Round here 3 bed simi with garage would be £600-700 to rent. To buy, £165,000-£200,000. Although I have seen one up for £139,000 - Repo. The real problem is very few people can afford to sell thier houses for what they are worth... What people can afford to pay them.

sorry

A pHD is stating the obvious I see. Is that how people get thier post counts up round here?

A vary intresting point of view, one that I have posted elsewhere. That is the majority of sales are much reduced quality property and as a result the indices are being skewed upwards. Although I agree that we have seen 20%+ falls across the board, looking forward I don't think those falls will continue. First off cash buyers will dwindle to the point where they do not mees with the indices. Many 'Homeowners' will be stuck in NE (not Tyneside) and will not be able to sell. So year by year they will nibble away at thier mortgage, a bit of inflation and things wont look so bad and they will cut thier loses and start agian. All the time prices will be dropping slightly year on year. It is within this set of circumstances that I need to look at when is the best time to buy and not look for some distant bottom of the market that may cost me 1,000s in rent waiting for.

As long as you intend to live in it through choice and not necessity

Using the excel spreadsheet VMR suggested, Here , I find myself £9000/year better off renting although I would like to look into it a little further before taking it too seriously. BTW that is using -4% HPI and +3% on savings based on a purchase price of £130,000.

[beeny] cost in building costs (£150,000) and finance costs (£10,000) cost of plot and your up to £250,00. Wheres the profit at todays prices? [/beeny]

I believe, we are not going to see much more than -4%/year but over the 6-8 years. Taking us to an overall 50% drop from peak. Judging by this year we are likely to see spring gains offset by winter falls ending up net down by -4%. I know people hate to have to mention it but what is this years % change figure. It has to be close to a net zero, Jan-Apr losses recovered by May-date gains? We should now see around 1%/month drops between Sept and Dec. End year -4% IMHO, obviously

Thats about as far as I got but then started getting confused with capital payments and, if I beieve corrctly, every mortgage payment there is an ever incrasing change in proportion of capital payment to intrest payment., admittedly very small.

Thought you were a member of the 90% club?

Cheers VMR, will play with that later.

I’ve been trying to work out at what point, in a falling market, is it cheaper to buy than rent. There must be a cut off point where your rent is more than your property losses/interest payments. If as I believe we see a Japanese style 'death by a thousand cuts' correction to 50% from peak over 10 years, then it should be easy to work out exactly when this point arrives. Problem is my maths isn’t up to it. Any takers?

An education, to whatever level, is not a measure of intelligence, a fact that many educated people don’t have the intelligence to understand. The whole education system is geared towards making very ordinary people believe they are intelligent. Education is merely force feeding information/knowledge, intelligence is how well you apply that knowledge. This poor sod has been done up like a kipper, believing she was clever enough to understand what she was doing. When it all goes wrong she blames it on someone else. If she’d have made £50,000 it would have been a result of her own ‘hard work’. Empathy, yes. Sympathy, no

If news international go that way then more and more people will drift to forums and free news sites. I honestly think that most people use online news sites because they are free. I can't remember the last time I paid for any website (apart from that one ) Will make linking to stories a pain though. How would the Mods deal with people cutting and pasting stories for validation of posts?

All my numbers have come from the LR figures and against what has been typical over the last 9-10 years. So what we are seeing is atypical. So when lower end stuff does start to sell, at levels typical to those of previous years, then a true picture will emerge. If I get really bored I might try and see if I can factor this in and see what it looks like.

This Is what I have been looking at this morning. In my post code sales topped at 500 sales/year for 06/07. Now we are looking at about 58 so far for this year with only 3 flats sold to date (130:7 extrapolated to the end of the year) agaist 70/year at peak. Detached sales as a pecentage of total have risen from 35% to 42% and semis from 20% to 30 %. Terraces have dropped from 30% of total sales to 24%. Flats from 16% to 5%. I have yet to factor in new builds ans these just aren't reselling. It is not that the higher end houses aren't falling in price, as they are - 16% from peak. It is just that there is very little selling at the bottom end to bring the overall average down.

I,m not even sure we've seen any real rises this year. It's a statistical effect. If you look at what is selling it tends to be better quality, higher priced stuff. The tat ilke newbuilds and flats are stuck on the market at close to 2007 prices as the ocupants cannot afford to sell them at the price the market is willing to pay. Is there any way the indicies can factor this in? Locally I've seen some significant drops accross the board, 15-25% on peak prices. However it's only those that can afford to lower their prices that are selling. These tend to be established home owners with a chunk of equity who tend to own better quality property. In short everything is dropping but only the top end is selling = impression of rising prices.

Bit of a non-story, 13,000 up 46,000 down whats the net cost or benefit?

Below is a list of Estate Agents operating out of Gillingham covering the SP8 postal area. All these agents have more than one shop in nearby towns such as Shaftesbury, Wincanton, Sherborne and Salisbury so it hard to see where they get any other income from other than lettings which seems to becoming their mainstay at the moment. · Chapman Moore · Nova Homes (not shop based) · Hambledons · Commels · Palmer Snell · Chaffers · The home Company (Opened 2009) · Gilyard Scarth · Colbert Smith There are also these that also cover the area but do not have shops in the town. I would imagine they cover a much wider area therefore I have not included them in the charts below. · Savills · Strutt + Parker · Chesterton �" Humberts · Symonds and Sampson · John D Wood · Jacksons, Stops & Staff · Fox Grant Bellow are three graphs showing the sales by value and volume from 2001 to date. The data is based on the land registry and the calculations assume that the EAs in the top list achieve no other sales from beyond the SP8 postal area. The EAs in the bottom list are not included. The final graph uses this data to give average EA monthly takings based on 2% commission. Note, 2009 is a projected number based on the first four months data. Now, there are some pretty wild assumptions in these graphs such as the commission not changing since 2000 and EA not achieving sales from beyond SP8 but it does give an overview of the situation they are facing and have been here since early 2008.

Net? No.

Mild steel, they have been making hydrogen cylinders out of it for years. Stop talking in absolutes when you have a very base understanding of what you are on about. Hydrogen will find it's way through most materials as you quite rightly pointed out but on a scale so small it is barely noticabe. I've had a 50H cylinder of calibration mix Hydrogen/Helium for nearly 4 years and it is still the same weight as the day we bought it, maybe in a couple of hundred years it will have lost a kilo or so. As far as embrittlement goes I supervise a £5million C22 Hastelloy hydrogenation reaction plant that has been in service for 8 years, no hydrogen contact part have yet failed. Just about everything else has. There are many, many issues with handling Hydrogen - none of these are insurmountable. Materials technology is moving at such a pace it is only a matter of time before yesterdays impossible becomes tomorrows nomality. I could list MANY examples of the mainstream thinking a thing impossible only for it to happen. The problem with you types is you have no vission. BTW Hydrogen as an everyday fule is crazy, you are correct that converting it into something more stable is the way forward. I know a lot of people knock wind and solar power as it tends to be an irregular source but, couldn't the glut periods be used for Hydrogen based production? Stop worrying it'll all turn out well in the end.

Swine flu has not gone away. They are awaiting the second phase. The WHO and many major vaccine producing pharma companies are going full tilt. The US had ordered 300,000,000 doses of flu vaccine. I have been doing nothing for the last three weeks other than installing new equipment for the production of one constituent part of one of the flu vaccines. A product we supplied 1500 litres of last year has gone through the roof, we have strong inquiries and have taken orders for over 20,000. Somebody is taking this VERY seriously. Not saying it won’t blow over but TPTB are taking measures.

Strange logic, You've never seen a BNP supporter who admits to being racist, then how do you know the organisation is racist? 'it walks like something I don't recognise and talks in a language I can't understand, guess what, it's a duck'