daveboden

Has a date been set for the 2007 budget report. If so, any rumours in the press about some kind of Stamp Duty-based help for FTBs?

Interest rates are a very blunt instrument which I'm not relying on to bring house prices back to a reasonable level. Only some properly directed, simple (!) initiatives to reduce the attractiveness of Buy-To-Let and 2nd home ownership will suffice. Don't bother learning anything, just learn how to apply for a B2L mortgage! Live the dream!

I agree. I wonder how many young families who've bought in way overt their heads are going to get bailed out by the government when bankrupcies pick up. The message is loud and clear from the current government; spending responsibly and contributing to the country will get you nowhere at all.

I've just sent a letter to my MP, Nick Reynsford. I've noticed that one of his Registered Interests is: Land and Property Two-bedroomed flat in London, from which rental income is received. See: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/nick_rayn...ch_and_woolwich Great. I wonder what will be done about house prices in Greenwich? Does your MP own a buy-to-let?

There's a development of 500 houses going up next to Greenwich mainline station (New Haddo Estate). Over half of them are classed as affordable housing. I've got nothing against Police, Nurses etc. having somewhere to live. They're pretty useful people to have around. However, subsidising housing is not the way to do it. Instead, the public sector should pay workers enough to attract them to central London. Then workers can choose to rent or buy, and if they're massively priced out of the market then they can choose to live and work somewhere else where they get a better standard of living. If the public sector couldn't subsidise housing, there's no way it could pay public sector workers enough to attract them to live in Greenwich! So maybe they'd wake up and realise that the earnings / property prices ratio is absolutely ridiculous and something needs to be done about it. By subsidising housing, they skip the issue and the tax payer secretly ends up footing the bill. (I work for an investment bank, by the way, and I can just (just!) afford a 1 bedroom flat in Greenwich. I can't afford one of these new ones...)

The snippet from the BBC was interesting. It made me realise how closely intertwined the housing bubble and the pensions mess are. The average person has no idea whether to put £10k or 10p into their pension this year. There's no confidence that the money will be there in 30 years time. Bricks and mortar are a much more "obvious" investment. People can see what they're buying. So, fortysomethings with money to spend may choose to plough money into buy-to-let property until there is a clear plan for pensions. Once you've bought a house and paid all that stamp duty, there's a lot of inertia. It's hard for someone to admit defeat and sell the property. All that spare money is propping up a grossly overvalued property market and will do for a little while longer due to the fact that anyone who buys a house is locked into the investment for at least a year due to their mortgage arrangements. (p.s. I live in Greenwich renting for £1100 per month (the local estate agent, Urtopia, advertises the same properties for £1400 per month ), my landlords are selling up in August as soon as their morgtage agreement has finished and they don't have any penalty clauses).

Allow me to suggest some changes to council tax and derelict property policy based on the principle that: "During an unprecidented demand for housing in the UK, no property should be vacant or derelict". If you agree that the principle is correct, may I suggest that: * Landlords who have vacant property should be charged council tax until new tenants are in. Moreover, I don't know why we collect council tax from tenants when it is homeowners who derive most of the benefit. Why not collect council tax directly from landlords? * Owners of derelict properties should be served a notice to get their property into a habitable state. If they haven't done this after 6 months (or a year...) then forcibly auction the house and give them 90% of the proceedings. Tenants get their bins collected and get their home protected by police. Does that cost £1100 per year? Landlords benefit from the improvement in their house's surrounding area. I'm paying through the nose for council tax in Greenwich and they're massively improving the area (which works out quite nicely for my landlord). Wouldn't it just be simpler to collect council tax from the property owner (and collect from the tenant and fine the property owner if this is not possible). When a property is full, the cost is simply passed onto the tenant with an increased rent to compensate. With derelict properties, the situation is more extreme. The owners of derelict properties drag an area down by encouraging petty crime. They pay nothing (for years, sometimes!) while the people who live next door to the derelict property pay council tax! A pub (which would make a great house conversion) on my road, close to Greenwich town centre has been derelict for at least 5 years and is now having £400k 2 bedroom apartments built around it and having its surroundings landscaped. The pub will now be worth millions and no council tax has been charged. I predict that these measures would bring down house prices by increasing the supply of houses and making it less desirable to be a landlord with a vacant property.

He just said that next week's "Breakfast with Frost" will be the last ever. Sometimes, you do get what you wish for!

Erm... I could ask more difficult questions than Frost. Is he reading off a script? Not exactly cutting to the heart of the matter is he? "Gordon Brown, please give us your rhetoric that you have prepared on house prices" ... "Ah, very good, thankyou". What a loser.

The delay until April 2006 is really good news, though. Hopefully now any potential FTBs will think "I'll wait until April and apply for this crazy scheme". That should dry the market right up.

I'm after a geared investment. Interest on a savings account is definitely better than nothing... but not much at the moment! After all, mortgages are probably the highest geared investments that the average person will consider owning. Putting £10k down on a £200k property is enormous gearing. We've seen how much people in the BTL market can gain (on paper) by exploiting massive gearing and owning 10 properties with a tiny deposit. Spread betting is always an option: http://www.financial-spread-betting.com/Ho...ad-betting.html Spread betting, however, isn't really doing the cause any favours. I'd rather bet directly against BTLers rather than a spread betting company.

Is there an investment vehicle that moves in an opposite direction to house prices? I'm sure that a few of us have a few thousand saved up for a deposit. I'd like to punt on the fact that house prices are going to come down. That way, if house prices do come down, I've got a bigger deposit! (obviously I understand that like all investments, it could go pear shaped). If enough of us put money in such investments, we might well create a self-fulfilling prophecy... I'm fed up of playing the waiting game and I want to put my money where my mouth is.

On the http://www.firsttimebuyerhelp.co.uk/links/ page, there is a brilliant article: No room for seconds Buying to rent is naked greed, and the real reason behind the housing shortage. That means you, too, Tony http://money.guardian.co.uk/houseprices/st...1397777,00.html OK, so I completely agree with this article. What's missing from the firsttimebuyerhelp website is a suggested approach. If you were in government, how would you change the tax system so that it is not cost effective to own buy-to-let properties? What would be great is if the proposed scheme could let buy-to-let landlords down gently. Personally, I'd like to see them lose loads... but the government is unlikely to back such a scheme. If we could tax landlords on the profit they have already made, it would be harder on people who've made more money anc can afford it. The mere mention of such a tax change would cause an instant reduction in house prices and a return to more realistic levels. Please note that it's not really enough to capital gains tax landlords when they sell a house. Many landlords plan to retire on their "investment", thus taking the house out of circulation for many years. We need a way of collecting money on a yearly basis (perhaps linked with recorded house price inflation). Should we stop people who are not resident in the UK from buying houses for buy-to-let? If so, what do you propose to do with all the existing landlords? Keep it realistic, please. p.s. My salary / rates have been going up constantly since I left university in 1999. Every year, I've consistently been priced out of the market. I couldn't buy in 1999 due to 8k student debt (negative deposit!). By the time I'd cleared that in 2000, a small 2 bedroom flat in Greenwich, London had gone up from £95k to £140k. Now it's £230k. Seriously! All of my peers are in exactly the same situation.