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We may have gone full circle. The mortgage lender Habito recently announced that it will let some buyers borrow up to seven times their salary – well above the traditional maximum – in order to help them “secure their dream home sooner”. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/jan/08/supersize-mortgages-can-you-get-one-and-what-are-the-dangers

😆

People in Hartlepool don't even like people from Sunderland, never mind actual foreigners. And no one from Hong Kong wants to live in Hartlepool.

I can remember how they voted. They told me!

PS "Those responsible" means those who voted for it. In a single-issue referendum it's difficult to hide from the fact that it was your decision.

Brexit hasn't really started to bite yet! I suspect there will be a lot more anger towards those responsible over the coming years. One thing I find interesting is that most people were very open (and indeed proud) about how they voted. Those who voted to leave are going to find it increasingly hard to dissociate themselves from the consequences.

As ethical dilemmas go this seems to be a pretty feeble non-issue. In fact your neighbour is in the wrong by causing a nuisance by light pollution. To put her behaviour in the best light (ooof) she is donating some light to you without even asking whether you want it. You are certainly doing nothing wrong.

Sorry to read this Count. You and I are of similar vintages. I hope you're not feeling too bad. Quite possibly stepping back and looking for other things to absorb your attention is good sense. And no amount of posting here or anywhere else will affect the price of housing one way or the other, so we'll miss you, but whatever is going to happen in housing market is going to happen anyway.

Surprising the press keep referencing the SD holiday as a driver. Prices have risen much more than than the value of the saving, and seem insensitive to the prospect of it being taken away. Ditto for interest rates - these have increased since last year, and for those most in need of it, has become much harder to get. Feels like this market is driven by an ever decreasing pool of wealthy buyers (see Rightmove data that suggests transaction volumes are down and falling). Pricing based on fewer and fewer transactions. Buyers oblivious to some of the factors coming down the pipeline near term (wealth taxes, property taxes, a release of properties from Boomers currently in hiding, costs related to ‘greening’ property). That’s before one considers that the main driver of all this (everyone being forced to spend more time at home) is about to go into reverse - with people spending less time at home, they will find they don’t need as much space as they thought (and living in the boonies is a bit boring). Not suggesting a crash is coming (it isn’t). Just that the current froth feels like it will be short lived, and the headlines are misleading.

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 couples could no longer both claim 30% relief on the first £60,000 of a mortgage. The announcement saw thousands of people rushing to buy before the deadline, sending prices spiralling. The subsequent crash left thousands of home owners with negative equity. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/141485.stm And that was without a pandemic, mass unemployment, the biggest recession in history and brexit! A rational government would certainly not be reintroducing stamp duty next year. (But then the grown-ups appear to have left the building - or been chucked out).

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 ?