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Well Frugal Git, that's a great retrospective of twenty years of HPI! If covid, brexit, mass unemployment, the biggest recession in history and the reimposition of stamp duty next year don't bring it all crashing down, I think we just have to dig in and wait for Jesus to return 😆

The stock response back then to a suggestion that governments wouldn't allow a crash to happen, and would take whatever fiscal and/or monetary steps were needed, was that a housing crash would overwhelm those mechanisms, and that no government had the power to stop it. That was wrong!

Thanks Mikhail, I remember that time! There was a bizarre mix of group-think orthodoxy, paranoia and authoritarian moderation before the site got sold on and became more commercialised. I can't remember what my username was then, but I was variously accused of being an estate agent troll, a BTL muppet, and I think I eventually got booted off for not being sufficiently crashy 😆

Two years later, still available, still £1.2m!

I seem to recall that it was a similar fiscal cliff edge that provoked the crash at the end of the eighties. There was an abrupt end to the very beneficial "double MIRAS" in 1988 which caused a similar rush to beat an arbitrary deadline accompanied by a surge in prices, and followed by tumble weed and a collapse. Boom and bust in the 1980s Repossessions last rocketed in the late 1980s and early 1990s following the housing market crash. Many blamed the then Chancellor Nigel Lawson's sudden decision to end double mortgage interest tax relief in August 1988. This meant couple

Holloway, one of the grottier bits of north London, mainly famous for two prisons and a traffic-choked arterial road, and now this remarkable piece of real estate! How to hide your damp problem in plain sight It's great that the agents listed it at £1m on 27th July and then on the same day immediately realised the folly of underpricing it so badly, and put it straight up to £1.2m ?

I bet a lot of these landlords who Hampton say have stopped renting properties, have just stopped renting via estate agents, and instead are renting out properties via Airbnb and similar as short-term lets, easily avoiding the weak 90-day yearly limit. The tax advantages of organising as a holiday-lettings business rather than a normal lettings business are also now more pronounced so wouldn't be surprising.

I'm guessing that the Daily Mail will have to be unusually careful as to how it reports a property crash now.

One of our regulars seems to be asking questions elsewhere ... https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/property/3002138-Current-Pickle-Rent-or-Buy

Some news from the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/0c3427b2-5ce1-11e7-9bc8-8055f264aa8b

Either the landlord is delusional (this seems unlikely, given that he's got an agent to advise him) or this is just a negotiating tactic: you ask for £150 off, he demands £150 more, you compromise and leave the rent unchanged. I'd ignore his response, try to overlook any game playing element, and ask yourself whether the rent saving on a new flat would outweigh all of the disadvantages of moving. If it would then move.

Brutalism doesn't mean what you think it means. It's about raw exposed concrete. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

International trade is incompatible with untrammeled national sovereignty. Government subsidies (is state aid) will not be tolerated within any significant trade agreements which the UK or any other country signs, for obvious reasons. If the UK wants to do as it pleases it will need to retreat into full-on isolationism.

In this metaphor the tenants are like the crack pipe, and the flat itself is the rolled-up tenner.

That's right. To get the attractive fixed low interest rate you have to tie yourself into the deal for anything between 2 and 10 years. During that time you face a stiff "redemption penalty" if you want out of the mortgage. Once that time is up you automatically get bumped onto the lender's standard variable rate (SVR). That will usually be higher, but not deliberately punitive. It applies to all of their borrowers who are not on a special deal, ie those who are too disorganised or lazy to refinance, or those who are credit-impaired or for some other reason wouldn't qualify for a special deal.