thehowler

Looks like that Virgin 5 year has been pulled already.

How things have switched. Debtors are prudent, savers are reckless.

And earnings inflation expected to drop further - stats soon, today or tomorrow, I think.

Note how they reel out the supply and demand line on HPI, rather than accede to argument that it might be driven by all the cheap money sloshing around.

Aye to this, as I whimpered on page 1. The banks are more scattered isles and lone, hilltop fiefdoms than we give them credit. Lloyds are simply protecting themselves, I reckon, having seen their high-deposit buffer against a correction brushed aside by HTB executive recklessness. They clearly anticipate a 30% drop over the next few years. The BOE and the executive are jousting. It was a disgrace that Humphrys let Cameron get away with that over-to-you line about the bank having all appropriate measures to control HPI, when Carney had been on the air the week before saying that it was out of the bank's hands. We credit them with too much intelligence and guile. The statements and events of this week reveal their wide-eyed haplessness.

Over the last few years, banks had a buffer of 20 - 30% on lending by restricting access to low rates to people with large deposits. If that was circumvented by HTB, perhaps banks are seeking other ways to limit their losses should prices dip by that much?

What's funding all this sudden demand? There has been no crash in London and London suburbs like OX2. Places that sold for 550k five years ago now come on at 875/900k. 3/4 bed terraces on Beechcroft Road selling for a bar or more. House I sold in Zone 2 London in 2005 has doubled in value since then. Family money, investment savings, and overseas wealth is all pouring into property and Oxford is seen as a safe bet. For more than a decade it's been the only game in town - an anchor-snapping shift in the way the Brits see the value of residential property - and there is no end in sight to it. Who predicted these rates so low for so long? Who imagined that the whole ethic of saving for the future would be derided as a trap for losers. Who would have accepted their kids coming out of uni with debts of 40/50k, (and this being seen as right and normal), just a few years back? Who understands the public apathy and disconnect over inflation-shrinking salaries, crowded schools, rising energy and food costs and a busted flush parliamentary system? There is nothing but the bubble or blow-up. Long live the bubble. Long live the sealed bids frenzy for drab houses on the Botley Road.

when I could be paying off my own... In Oxford, we all breathe the opium of high house prices. If you're not trapped, why don't you move somewhere you can afford a house you like?

A Wednesday chortle with thanks to the Oxford mail... the landlord even throws in a pot plant. http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/9472912.Shed_for_rent_highlights_housing_shortage/?ref=mr

I'm sure Lowenbrau was pushing £1.30-1.50 a pint when I was quaffing in '84/'85 - and that was in the frozen north of Albion. Skol/beer must have been around a 90 pence to a quid. I remember handing over the crinkly, green notes. When I ran out of fags - Bensons, might have been £1.60 - my girlfriend used to wander off, no mention to me, charming the regulars. She'd return to the beer-sopping table with an assortment of smokes in her perfect, pink paw. Her fawn-like innocence swept aside any doubts and darker considerations. Much has changed. As for seventy smackers per week in this present world, I'm surprised so many of you think it generous. Cost of meat has gone up a lot in last two years, as has fruit, butter and coffee beans. I'm dropping at least fifteen dinero a day to keep a fair table. Table wine has moved from around 7 to 9/10 quid for a decent bottle and fish is running down in quality - if you don't want it farmed. All that said, I can get a bottle of ale for £1.50 - with a standard 20% price cut - that tastes better than anything brewed in the 80s.

"I can sense you blowing and huffing when you said that." The howler does not huff.

That's right, sold to the developer for 495k on 27th Jan 2010: http://www.zoopla.co.uk/house-prices/oxford/longworth-road/ox2-6ra/?q=ox2%206ra Granite kitchen tops and Starck bathrooms aint cheap you know.

This has just come on for 725k, three bed shabby semi Frenchay Road. Check out the Chaplin Gold Rush stove in the back room. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-18340449.html The house next to it - same Victorian semi design - sold for 660k a year ago. Plenty of brio from the agents still, it has to be said.

"I know I'm not representative, it's just that something doesn't feel right about the whole situation." You said it, brother. All of us who contribute to this subforum are in the position to buy, yet none of us do. What does that mean? It could be that we remember Oxford when it was poor, dank and rain-sodden. And that people don't earn much money here. And we all imagine that the prices will halve - but they never do. Vive les malcontentes

"and both contradict your view" What is contradicted? My stated view was that even with drops of 30% the prices are redonculous. To illustrate this, behold: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-32111102.html Longworth House is down at £999K - though they don't have the balls to say it. That's a 20% drop from last asking, if you don't go back to their summer pitch at £1.4mil. But so what? It's still overpriced, or do you disagree? They need to cut and then cut again, before we can start chalking.

I remember coughing on my organic cornflakes the day I saw that these flats were up for sale at £499K, in the summer of 2006. (Bar the ground floor two which the developers took). They all sold. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-18046662.html So talk of 30% price drops don't mean much, doth it? Sometimes I think the whole culture of house buying has changed and people will always pay more than they did, other times I think it could drop 50% and nobody would bat a lid.

"What I struggle to understand are the comments on bankers flocking to Oxford" As you surmise, it's probably correct to say there are no bankers flocking to Oxford. The glib London bonus BS is one of the straws clutched at by agents and moron home owners in OX2 to make sense of the absurd pricing. OX2 housing supply is strangled, with only a few homes in each major price group coming on the market each month. They are bought by: - people selling in London and moving here. - people with money moving here from outside Albion - people who have been waiting for decades for a house on a certain street and come into an inheritance - people borrowing money off their colleges - people who come into an estate and think it will be a welcoming place to die - people with mad development ideas And there are only a few of them doing this each month, but enough to keep the market ticking over. There are no bankers and I haven't met anyone buying a house in OX2 on a mortgage for years. Equally, most people quit after three or four years, when they realize there's not a lot of work here and the services/restaurants/bars are pretty poor compared to London.

It's Sitzkrieg here in Oxford town, with the prices holding steady, But Fallingbuzzard won't be drawn even though he's got the reddies, With a shine in his eye, Capability cries, "the market's about to bounce", "Like it or not, lads, face the facts, soon you'll have to pounce." Shavedchimp he dithers, while the agents slither, and others start to boast, "It's different here, it's the schools you see and your savings accounts are toast." Then the Howler steps in, side-stepping the din, says "boys, keep those wallets shut tight," "If a house costs a bar, where you can't park your car, this bounce is a crock of

The market is stratified by cost to a greater degree than five or ten years ago, or the time of the last bust. So the houses I follow - 550-600K five years back and now up in the high eights and nines, if not more - have soared out of any mortgage equation. Typically, one adult goes into London to work and I don't think they're on 250/300K salaries to fuel any current multiples - I know some in Ox claim bankers are moving in but I've never met one and don't buy the idea - but they did get lucky with the value of their houses in the 2006 boom. I'd go further and say that salary is no longer correlative with the kind of house these people are buying. The money comes from family or they've sold somewhere affluent and are trading across - not down, as zone 2 London is on a par with North Central Ox. As long as these people don't lose their London jobs - mostly private sector, I'd guess - then I don't see the spending review impacting on their buying choices in Ox. They'll keep coming, fearing the London snap, and the family money will keep ploughing into the Vic semis. So, no massive crash in my hunting grounds. Could be tougher for the public sector horde.

We are being rough-handled by events, I feel.

Don't know about the Southmoor Rd pad but Longworth was a wreck - I used to stroll past it. The bubble is not yet pricked in Oxford town.

Didn't this one go for around £500k at the start of the year? http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-27506599.html This one now suspended while they pick a new price out of J C Penny's maroon beret. Oxford Times prop section thick as the Decameron this morning - and littered with as many poignant tales of mad ambition. Double-fronted house on Staverton Rd priced to match the Bainton Rd bargain. Crazy. None of my peers anticipate drops but Occam's Razor is slicing closer, tickling the neck like Poe's pendulum of doom. These prices are fictitious.

Another horse's hoof in the forehead for the old OX2 incorrigibles... Didn't this one go for around £500k at the start of the year? http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-27506599.html Side entrance and it doesn't appear to have a garden. It might even be the wreck that was sold at auction for the animal sanctuary, or was that on Walton Well Rd? We know everything that will happen, we just can't guess which thing it will be me. Yet it tests my psyche trying to imagine outcomes where this can slide 50%. Same with this semi overlooking the playing fields, on for almost a bar half... http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-31230368.html That's a doubling since 2005. So you win the Pulitzer, change the course of cultural life or prove your worth in commerce - all to live on Bainton Road? What petty rewards for great acts we offer to the young. No wonder they stand transfixed, squirrel-in-the-halogens-like, mop-haired and dithering between their shiny devices as the great grinding machine of Kapital looms over them, a leviathan of doubt and debt to pound their bones, dreams and mp3 players to jelly.

Flood it does. And Osney. The Botley Road is a tarmac dike, holding back the gushing torrents of the Thames that promise to level PC World and the other glittering towers of the West Oxford retail horrorscape. OX2 price anomalies aside, I've seen a lot of new houses coming to market in the upper 500s. Most of them look like rentals in the pics so perhaps the landlords are starting to scurry for a porthole?