adarmo

QED a leveraged investment is a dangerous one.

Glazed over yet again. I shall call you doughnut henceforth.

The flat we vacated at the end of August when we purchased our new house has been sitting empty despite them reducing the rent back to the level we paid when originally moving in there in Easter 2016. I guess the issue is slightly more nuanced since the LL owns the entire block and reducing the rent further might cause the other tenants to start to ask for a reduction too. Having said that he doesn't need the money, of the five units only three were occupied when we moved in and only one more was finished.... about 14 months after we moved in. There's one more unit left to complete but no action on that at all. The interesting thing will be if the BTL lot start having to subsidise their BTL mortgages and become forced sellers. I maintain there will be no crash without forced sellers in increasing numbers.

I think you're being sarcastic so..... 1. There's no such thing as 'contract law'. At the highest level there are two branches of law in the UK. Case and Statute. 2. The contract has a notice period of one calendar month Not that I agree with the sentiment there of course. Shame you've glazed over the point about older people profiling tenants in favour of a flippant and pointless remark.

And the applause was conspicuous by its absence. I am still of the opinion that above a certain age people view tenants as second rate people who are not intelligent enough to buy without taking full stock of the housing market they've effectively created. The old boy we bought our home from mentioned that one of our neighbors was renting and said "if you get any trouble with him the landlord lives across the road (and pointed to his house) and you can get him straightened out". Anecdotal of course but I see that older people tend to judge tenants much more than anyone my age (mid 30s)

And what a dilemma. I Can see why many are not keen on buying at the moment and believe that they'll crash by virtue of the fact that eventually everyone will see the light but as a narcissist everyone else is too stupid to stop paying these prices so that's pretty much my analysis of why i bought.

Yep. Thing is it's easy to argue we'd all be worse off if we lost all of that. Cheap housing yes, but a bit crap if there's no respect for property rights and we can't import anything.

But keeping focused on the house price issue...... Yeah maybe it'll unwind at some point but pretty much every year of my adult life they've got more and more expensive.

Pound could in theory keep falling. QE forever

If the pound falls 10% then to the foreign buyer they've just got cheaper. Yields are also cheaper but many aren't butting to rent out, the Chinese in particular believe property devalues from when it is live in. Also, if the rest of the world is becoming less safe (Trump, Kim Jong, hurricanes, global warming etc) then London becomes a relatively safer place to stash cash. This is not a good thing but it seems to me that we are the victims of successfully building a very decent, safe and legally fair country.

Global city, legal protection of property rights, open economy, weak pound etc

Agreed. This is why I was initially excited about BitCoin but in reality it can't scale and it's fool's gold plus too many other ICOs mean it's essentially a heavily unregulated IPO but without any rights. Caveat emptor. -ve equity is not really so much a concern if, like you say, rates stay low. I just like the idea of hitting 75% LTV in two years after a nice revaluation and paying down the mortgage. Regardless of prices I'd sooner not pay the banks a penny more than I have to

You're like my parallel! If I took his advice and waited 10 more years I dread to think how irate I'd become watching my savings get slaughtered by inflation and more QE not to mention being 10 years old and unable to borrow for a long a term as I'd initially wanted. No doubt the housing position in this country sucks but ultimately it's a market (a market where supply is constrained in the short term, and demand is ramped with immigration and more importantly cheap and easy credit).

Looks like you found one of the broken clocks.

It literally starting taking off when they offered a free bottle of water with it Heathrow air-side. I wont fly without one.

This is what we eventually came around to thinking, plus we had a very narrow criteria of what we wanted to purchase. I offered on three houses in twelve months of looking. Drove the GF a bit mental tbh but we managed to buy from people with no chain who wanted a quick move. House needed work so I've been learning all about that and enjoying it as I've gone along. Hopefully we've been adding value but for me the ultimate goal in this game we find ourselves in is to end up with a really nice place to live. I'm not actually bothered about prices now (save for not being in enormous negative equity and being crushed by punitive interest rates). I agree with your last point. Something is wrong when bad news is cheered by the stock market with the expectation of yet more QE and the prudent are being rinsed to the benefit of the feckless and profligate.

Plus look at all the additional investment going on. Third runway, Crossrail 1 and 2. IMHO London is crackers prices but a lot of the SE is fairly decent and many HQs have located out into the home counties to offer an improved work/life balance. Anecdotally we felt the same as you. We could wait to hear if the broken clocks on this site would eventually be proved right but I like the idea of being a contrarian and buying at a time when many are not. Handed in our notice and bought a place. Our landlord was actually a really decent chap and had converted the old building into five flats so was a rare case of actually providing housing since his family built the house in the first instance before he extended and converted. Anyway, we left beginning of September and it's still being advertised for £20/month now less than we were paying.

Good point. Will be able to check out their 2017 results soon enough and see if they're taking market share from DFS or if indeed we're sitting on a sofa recession.

DFS revenue down and IKEA UK's up by roughly the same amount. http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/this-is-ikea/newsroom/press-release/ikea-uk-business-results/ That should cushion the blow.

Can only speak for myself but my 12 year old car is just fine and I'm hoping it'll last long enough so that i can afford to replace it with an electric one. Analytically it might be that so many put off upgrading or replacing during the GFC that the last few years have been above the natural run rate.

+1 We completed on our house five weeks before I turned 35 (two months ago now). Same thought process as you though regarding age/retirement and mortgage lenders do have a maximum age too. Around here the Brexit vote seemed to take the wind out of the sails of the market. Prior to the vote I doubt I would have even got a viewing on the place we bought, let alone getting anything like the deal we got on it. Like you we had been saving for a long time and managed 15% deposit on a house needing a lot of TLC (and in some cases a lot more!). I'm of the opinion that the modernising work I do to the house is adding value and once we come off the fixed rate we'll at worst have stayed level on the LTV even if the market goes against us. This is important since LTV greater than 85% starts to attract much higher interest rates. If you go for it and you're determined you'll be able to clear the mortgage before you're 70 so I wish you luck and happy hunting .

Comes in next year I thought?

Absolutely. I can't see that changing anytime soon. Old people vote themselves free crap at the expense of the young. Homeowners wont tend to vote for lower prices (even though many would be better off, or at the very least no worse off).

I can't tell you how troubling I find it that enough people take this mental Labour idea seriously enough in a supposedly well educated and developed country that the Tories feel the need to adopt it. Ultimately you can't blame the govt you have to blame the electorate. Policies are tailored to those who vote. Since homeowners are more likely to vote than tenants we have the mental house price situation we find ourselves in.