Casual Observer
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Posts posted by Casual Observer
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You seem rather perturbed CO, care to let us in on what ails you?
National house builders are consolidating their regional offices in tandem with revising their costs and margins as we speak. Doesn't take a genius to figure out why either, does it?
Come on CO, you've had a good innings, time to settle up. Also, I hope for your sake, that your lad gets through it in one piece btw...
Not at all perturbed. I was just hoping I'd get a bit of sensible debate about the effectiveness of RBs monthly LR figures, is all. As usual though, no-one wants to acknowledge the truth that they don't want to hear
Son's fine thanks. Equity risen to about 100k I reckon. Not bad for a 26 year old.
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The slums we rented had brown wallpaper, a 15 watt brown light bulb, a saggy p*ss stained bed and a filthy shared bathroom and toilet. The 50 odd yr old landlord was a complete cnt who had the power to thow you out on the street without any notice and had a key to your room and could come in anytime you wernt there to sift though your things, he also paid only £70K for the white 5 storey victorian building that was just off Kensington gardens in Notting hill. Ths was what rented accomodation was all about in London before the 90's and to top it off the rent was much more than you would pay today for something much nicer and with far more rights (£50 per week for a room with 2 single beds in it when take home wages were about £50 per week, 1980). The landlord was not a boomer, he would have been born sometime in the 1920's and would have made a killing on that propery during the late 80's boom. If you think 'get rich quick' was something invented by the boomers you are way off course, belive me when they die/retire there will be many of your age group more than willing to fill the spot, there is the same proportion of every age group willing to rip off anyone they can in order to feather their own nest.
(if you want to see an example of pre 90's rented accomodation, watch an episode of 'Life on Mars' )
Steve, my parents come from the Ladbroke Grove area (I lived there until I was 5, in 1958).
I know exactly where you are coming from. Some of the cr&p people come out with, about how cushy life used to be, make me laugh.
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1) I'm not looking to live anywhere near you...
2) I trust my own eyes as always...
So my explanation about how RB's figures are not reliable indicators was a bit too complex for you to understand then?
Anyone else understand it well enough to knock my explanation down in flames or agree with me?
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A sight for sore eyes innit?
Have you noticed they've removed the sales office (portakabin) from the Kings Oak dev. on the Bath Rd just outside Taplow (nr. Sainsburys)? The poor lass in there was just about ready to top herself from the boredom I suspect.
PS. Kings Oak are no more, they've been amalgamated back into the Barratt fold...
Can we get a bit of common sense about these local LR figures?
In my area we have an estate of bog-standard, smallish, box-shaped detached houses that sell for around 450k.
Another part of the patch has a very upmarket area where gated houses on a private estate go for around 1.5 million.
If in 1 month 10 of the small ones and 3 of the large ones sell, the average works out to 900k.
The next month, 12 small ones might sell and 1 big one. The result? An average price of about 531k.
Think about it folks - these stats are not indicators of price movements. The volumes and mixes are not constant. This was all explained to RB about 16 months ago, when he posted this rubbish almost daily, to prove that the crash "started" in 2006. He didn't seem to grasp it.
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yeah, but in those days, not so many people were working simply to pay vast overbearing mortgages.
No, they were working to feed their families.
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Gastropubs and expensive restaurants are full of boomers living it up.
How very dare they!
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I'm bored and it's the start of the bank holiday. Think I'll head out in the pick up truck and lynch a few boomers.
The one on the right looks like Bart of Darkness
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The level of transactions has halved since the eighties, and many FTB properties are being bought by BTLers. The affordability picture is being distorted by a limited supply of wealthy parents and grandparents prepared to hand out large sums of cash to their offspring to get on the ladder.
IMO it won't be long now until the supply of FTBs and new BTLers dwindles sufficiently to precipitate a downturn.
Maybe, but the market doesn't care where the money comes from, provided it's there.
I think this is where people get perplexed about why the market isn't acting the way their models or history predict it - you and I may think it is unfair or undesirable that FTBs have been displaced by BTLs or a smaller group of FTBs who have inheritances - But the market doesn't give a to$$.
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I agree. When do you think this will happen?
Edit: More up to date quote from CO.
In nominal terms I don't think it will in this cycle. I think prices will reach a plateau and that there will be enough buyers at those prices to maintain the market there until wage inflation improves affordability.
Which is pretty much what I saw in my neck of the woods in the early 2000s, before prices started to rise again.
Unless they carry on rising too far this year of course, in which case they could fall. But I don't think we'll see many more months of nominal rises.
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And how many kids do they have?
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Now your contradicting yourself. You say there will always be a constant turnover but then you say that at some point this number will reduce:
You're quoting me a bit out of context!
When there aren't enough buyers at a prevailing price the market price will fall.
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However many defensive rants CO comes out with, I've never heard a reasonable, rational explanation for this. In the mid-late 1960s my parents bought a three-bed terraced house in St Albans. My father was a university lecturer, my mother didn't work. They had three kids. The house is now worth about £400k. So you'd need an income of about £100k to live that lifestyle now, and that's going without iPods, cable TV, and all the other consumer "tat" that younger people allegedly waste their money on. A university lecturer with the equivalent job at the same career stage would earn ca £35k.
The area was full of professional middle-class people with small kids, supported by one working parent. Houses that now cost £400-£500k.
You can spin this all you like. You can say well, the kids will inherit. Sure, at around the age of 60. I've had the comment from my mother "it's OK for your generation, you will inherit all this". Maybe, maybe not, as it depends on healthcare provision and costs. But what this doesn't allow for is the fact that my parents' generation owned houses in their late 20s/early 30s that you now need six-figure salaries to buy. No, they didn't inherit anything, but they didn't need to; because houses were affordable for anyone with a reasonable job (to pre-empt CO's usual remark that "if houses were so cheap why didn't everyone buy one").
I went to a hustings for the local elections on Wednesday to hear the would-be Labour councillor say, in reply to a question about affordable housing, that she supports an increase in renting. Because housing is totally unaffordable anywhere round here (Cambridge and please, PG, don't start banging on about Luton). FIne, let's lock a generation into renting, only then they won't build up the assets their parents' generation enjoyed...and so it goes on.
Of course there are some greedy young btlers. But the only LLs I know in Cambridge are fifty-somethings, apart from one and she rents rooms in her own house to pay the mortgage. And the wealth transfer effect isn't only effected through high house prices. It occurs through higher taxation to pay for run-down infrastructure (because the previous generation was undertaxed), through generous pension provision that is now being withdrawn, through PFI, through carpet-bagging, and through paying less in real terms for housing. Anyone who can't see this is living in denial.
My 30 year old nephew just bought a 3 bed terraced house in the centre of St Albans. He's an employee in a recruitment agency. His wife works part time. He firts bought a house in 2001 in Watford.
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The wealth is spendable when boomers release equity by downsizing to a retirement home.
Spendable by whom? The bloke in the retirement home? What does he spend it on, Lamborghinis?
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But I thought all the nasty baby boomers had all the wealth they stole from us youngsters.
It amuses me how often two conflicting articles pop up along side each other here so often. Good for balance I guess.
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It’s a boom, not precious to me.
Nor me. I'd have been much better off without it.
I can't understand why you called it my precious boom, that's all.
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If you have £650 outstanding on your mortgage you have not paid it off and the Bank still have a charge on your property.
So what?
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i remember those, the ones that proved prices were crashing nominally countrywide
Those are the ones.
Some of us got shot down for pointing out the nonsense of it all, but no-one ever admitted that they weren't actually evidence of month on month falls throughout 2006.
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I'm not saying (and I hope other's aren't) that the over 50s didn't work hard, just that their wealth is disproportionate to the work done...
The part of the wealth you're talking about though isn't spendable is it? It doesn't matter to me that the house I bought is worth a lot more than when I bought it - I can't spend it. The only thing I might be able to do is borrow against it, but that's not like spending the wealth itself, is it?
I think the whole concept of us being wealthier because of the value of our homes is daft - most of the wealth will just pass onto the next generation, either directly or via inheritance tax.
As for the rest of it, well that was earned through our work, and so it is deserved..
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Great Crash 2 is indeed only just beginning. We are feeling nothing more than the first faint breezes of its awesome power as it gathers momentum across the Atlantic.
You were telling us 16 months ago that it had already started crashing here. Remember your LR figures that "proved" it?
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Prices have dropped in many areas. That's for CO who believes the US market has not yet begun to see any declining prices. Many are burying their heads in the sand as it is very hard to come to terms with seeing your investment drop 30-40 or even 60% as a result of GC2.
Did you just make that bit up?
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Eh? No there won't, nor has there been!They may not have been the same kind of people who entered it in the past, but the numbers of houses sold suggests that someone's buying them.
And when there aren't enough of them the price will adjust to find them, otherwise there isn't a market
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Your precious housing boom has made clever people rich, stupid people feel rich and the birth rate of this country drop to below 1.4 per couple a decade later then they used to.
It's as much your precious housing boom as mine, mate.
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What that illustrates is that only those earning significantly above average earnings can afford to get on the property ladder. There must be a very limited supply of people like this. What happens when there is none left?
There will always be a constant turnover of people entering the market, and a proportion will earn the higher rather than the lower amount. I don't think it's a case of there being a finite number and we're working our way through them.
If there weren't enough of them, the price would adjust in real terms to meet the new, lower demand.
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It is not sufficient to be worthy of respect in order to be respected." - Alfred Nobel
I never did like that old git
House Prices Crashing?
in House prices and the economy
Posted
In the recent RB love fest post I thought of recommending a knighthood...
Sir Realist Bear?