North London Rent Girl

Wow - if this message starts getting out there it might have a tremendous effect, mightn't it? If people stop mewing then pop goes credit boom and if people stop buying housing as their 'pension' that would help speed up the crash. Super dooper. Another nice topic, RB, you're a star.

Libitina - this is a good idea. If someone with some design talent made a standard sticker for the site and posted it up here we could all download it, print it out and stick it on lamposts and so on. I think the label shouldn't say much, it should just have 'housepricecrash.co.uk' in some kind of eye-catching font on some funky-looking background. Anyone have good design skills? I have zip but 'I know it when I see it'!

You most definitely are not! Have you heard of Compassion in World Farming? It's a wonderful organisation - I think Joanna Lumley is it's patron, gawd luv'er. Also, the Green Party (I'm a member) wants all factory farming phased out. I have no illusions that they'll be forming the next government but the more of a voice they have the better. Don't want to try to make political capital out of your kind impulses but if you have a green candidate in your area might be worth considering them this week!

Yay! You hardly ever see anyone making this link. Routine dosing of antibiotics mashes up the birds' immune systems and horrific overcrowding creates vast breeding grounds for disease, where viruses can pass from sick hen to sick hen, mutating as they go. There's an excellent radio show about avian flu here (pacifica radio rules!).

I completely agree, dipstick. I grew up in the countryside and hate this kind of industrial farming. It's not that the sheds shouldn't go in any particular place, it's that they shouldn't go anywhere.

Noooooooo - I am Waldorf and Statler!!!! I've been trying to reconcile myself to the fact that I agree with just about everything that's said on 'Grumpy Old Men' and now this. Although maybe I really am because I love the joke that goes with them: "This is a very moving moment" "Yeah, I wish they'd move it to Pittsburgh!"

Oh my effing lord - this has surely got to be one of those 'bump up the average asking price' wheezes. A million quid? As usual, first thing I did was check out the garden, and I quote: "Decking area on to fully paved area part of which can be iused as parking space." The fact that there's decking is bad enough - what is it with bloody decking - why is it good? It's like laminate flooring. I see decking and laminate flooring and just think of that 70s pretend-wood-panelling wallpaper. But decking then a bit of bloody paving that you could park a car on for a million squid - you couldn't make it up. What are we talking about here - a 30x30 garden? My giddy aunt. Oh, sorry, that's right, it's not 'a million pounds' - a friend of mine put me right about my silly thinking recently. We were talking about a small 2-bed flat for a quarter of a million pounds that he was contemplating buying. He said that it's not a quarter of a million pounds, it's whether you can afford it each month. What? It's a quarter of a million effing pounds for eff bloody all in the middle of effing nowhere, for effing eff's sake, have you run effing mad? I didn't say that last bit out loud. Bit pissed, back from pub - actually pefect state of mind to contemplate million pound shitholes in shitty watford. Edit: only latterly noticed the excellent use of the word 'fully' in that description of the 'garden'. 'Fully paved', mind you, none of your partially paved tat here, oh no. Can't put the ridiculousness of it into words.

yeah baby!

But only to put a brick through the window and put in the front lights of an unattractively patterned green and yellow mini.

But we aren't perma bears, think of us as temp bears! Who's a perma bear? Don't know any on this board.

We might have more idea if nulabor MPs and assorted labor cronies had to disclose how many of them had second (or third or fourth) homes themselves. Tonius Blairus for starters would be paying how many ctaxes on non-primary residences? At least 4, isn't it: the big london house, the constituency house, the two flats in Bristol - any more? Self-serving bstards the lot of em.

well said pondy

And some of them just plain old suicide.

Ireland has been the recipient of absolutely vast quantities of EU cash. Yes, it's grown from nothing, so its growth rates have been extraordinary, but would it manage without its regular EU bottle-feed? Would be interesting to find out. 'High growth rates so why not 10x mortgage' - what planet are you on? It's completely irresponsible lending - something that might well one day be confirmed by judge!

Quite - especially when you have the Berlusconis and their ilk to keep up with. Thank goodness Tony's forced through 30 million for flashier planes to ferry him about, too - it's just embarrassing not to have an up-to-date private jet.

this sentence dooms itself not quite oxymoronic but something like that! The EA is acting for the seller and paid on commission on the final purchase price so of course if they can they'll try to gain the upper hand in negotiations by trying to find out what the buyer's cards are - v. unfair. Love the way that EA puts on a pained face and says 'we're the ones with a monopoly on lying' - not quite, sunshine, but it's plainly something you're all working towards .

Oh, no, Michael Gove now speaking, sense no longer being talked! Still worth a listen.

Yeah, what the hey, I'm going to nip out today and bag me two!! Rent out one for killer profits, live in t'other, this time next year we'll be miwyonaires!!

growl i liked your old avatar why have you changed it this one's very slick and everything but the old one was sweet. all of this changing of avatars business that people do - what's wrong with things the way they are? all this change. anxious bear

No cos nulabor will keep its wealthy voters' servants available by conning them into rubbish shared ownership schemes that keep them in debt bondage for the rest of their days - instead of letting the market operate as it's meant to. If I were you and I wanted to live down there I'd get together with some mates and sqat. You'd be living where you want to and you'd be local heroes. There's a squat up in Highgate that the locals are really in favour of and that would make people's attitude towards you positive, too - much better to have nice idealistic young people squatting in your village and being part of the community than shitty banker's pet second home empty 48 weeks of the year.

It would be so great if young people in the Westcountry got together and organised squats en masse. It's hellish. Wealthy people move down there when they retire and spend their last decades putting nothing into the local economy but draining state funds and having low-paid services provided for them by locals. It's a kind of financial apartheid. Seriously, if they squatted they'd have a massive amount of support. I wonder if they would be able to find people down there who would be willing to execute evictions against them. They'd probably need to draft people in from outside. Young people down there put up with far too much - I grew up there from the age of 10 and my M&D still live there so I know whereof I speak. The whole place has become some kind of awful theme-park for the rich - as usual, in need of a bit of a slap, if you ask me. Go on young Westcountriers, sock it to them!

Has it been ignored? I followed some link on here a while back and ended up listening to an interview with the author, and very interesting it was, too. Maybe it wasn't a direct link, can't remember - in any case definitely got to it from here. Anyway, nice one for mentioning it now - must order the book.

Am reading an excellent book about the miseries of white-collar America by the wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich - 'Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream' (2005). At one of the numerous executive workshops she attends: "After lunch, it's Cynthia's turn. She describes herself as 'living on the edge ... seeing life as an adventure,' but there's more defensiveness than bravado in this, as if she's anticipating a rebuke. The problem is she's burned out on real estate; the market has collapsed, and she can't break even. She's putting longer and longer hours into the company but finding herself losing ground financially every month. 'What should I do with my life?' is the question that has brough her here." Pity for Cynthia aside for a moment, what I like about this is the same thing as the radio clip I posted a couple of weeks back about the US market - it's the casualness of the references to the bubble bursting, the market collapsing and so on. It is increasingly a commonplace - doesn't raise eyebrows. People know that it's happening there - they don't seem to be so head in the sand about it. Strange, for a culture that in many other ways seems to have left reality behind a long time ago.

As an American friend of mine from Queens says, 'like, helllooOOo?!' To buy a house is, for the vast majority of people, to overstretch themselves. Ergo your advice (note the spelling of these common words, by the way) to any person looking to buy a house is not to buy a house. Nobel prize to you for stating the painfully bloody obvious, silly billy.