ForGreatLager...

Sure, I know it was (weirdly very precise) scaremongering, but I thought it was based on the shock of triggering article 50 the next day. Which, of course, didn’t happen.

Wasn’t that 18% drop based on Cameron triggering article 50 the day after the vote though?

Where are they going to work?

This is a good point. How many BTLer’s plan was to sell at the top of the market? The foreseeable future’s not looking great, so the peak has probably just gone. Now chasing the market down? How about all the AirBnB owners? No one knows how long the effects of Covid are going to last. Is AirBnB finished effectively?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/51560120 https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-furlough-number-hits-9-million-days-before-cut-off-092912511.html

You also have to take into account the EA’s profit factor. If sellers don’t want to reduce their price in a falling market, and no buyer wants to pay the original price, then the property doesn’t sell and the EA doesn’t get paid. At some point EAs will have to start encouraging vendors to be more realistic purely for their own pay packet.

Well if they don’t, then the well known threat of repossession ‘if you can’t keep up repayments’ becomes an empty one which could set a very dangerous precedent for the future of lending. If someone has put their house on the market, then presumably they intend to sell it for the most they can. However, if the national sentiment has turned to prices falling (as we’ve been warned since Brexit was going to happen), then it becomes a buyers market. Regardless of local economies All buyers (nationally) now hold the cards and are going to want to knock the price down as far as they can. It then becomes a matter of how much the seller is willing to reduce their asking price to mitigate further potential falls. It only takes one seller in the street to drop their price to set the value for the rest.

Is sentiment not national though? Once there’s a constant stream of job losses in the media, houses not going down in price isn’t going to make sense to anybody.

Or how much that will grate on the people who carried on working. At some point they’ll need to know which of the furloughed companies are going to survive or not so they can shift the employees onto a less costly set of benefits. Furlough can’t go on forever if a company is effectively dead (don’t quote me on that ?). Maybe UBI is inevitable?

Wait until the end of the year. If the end of furlough, the job losses, further lockdowns and Brexit don’t hammer the housing Ponzi scheme, then nothing will. If, however the govt do find a way of keeping prices high through all of this, then sad to say, I think we’ll finally have to accept defeat at the hands of institutional corruption.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/johnson-cuts-affordable-housing_uk_5efb1da1c5b6ca970914c2c2

“You had me at ‘if’.”

Quick back of the fag packet maths suggests by the end of this year we could see out of a population of 66 million, just 22 million in employment. And that will be a mix full time, part time and the zero hours gig economy jobs.

I see lots of this. I think that’s what some men want though; someone to mother them after they’ve flown the nest. I also see the type who spend as much time as they can away from ‘her indoors’, at work or down the pub with their friends. They’re the brow-beaten ones at the BBQ who dress how they’re told and roll their eyes every time ‘mother’ nags at them.

And that was about 2.5 million people. At the end of this year we could potentially have: 1.5 million officially unemployed 8.5 million ‘economically inactive’ 9.3 million redundant In Total: 19.3 million people not working.

So just after the initial wave of the virus, that’s nearly a third of the UK working population looking at potential redundancy. And apparently there’s still worse to come from the pandemic. It does feel like we’re in the calm before the storm to me.

Exactly. It’s like Marriage is the peak of some people’s relationship, so it’s only downhill from there on. I also feel some people really just want a wedding day with all the attention it brings and don’t really consider the contractual part of marriage. “Best day of my life.” We decided long ago that it just wasn’t for us. We couldn’t understand how signing a contract would somehow improve your emotional commitment to someone. It really upset a few married people a while back and lead to some pretty heated conversations. They just couldn’t grasp why people wouldn’t get married, as if there was something wrong with them. But I see many more unmarried couples these days who are doing just fine without the paperwork. I hear you. People have no idea how hard it is. Some days the idea of water boarding seems like a relaxing Spa day. It’s totally worth it though. I’ve always understood if people don’t want kids though; it’s not for everybody.

Yes, or what about a whip-round? Come on guys, dig deep, they really have suffered over the years.

Each to his own, but marriage has always struck me as a bit archaic. I’ve also noticed on more than a few occasions that once a couple gets married, the effort that goes into the relationship drops considerably. It’s as if they’ve ‘made it’ and so don’t need to bother anymore. I’ve attended several weddings that have soon ended in divorce. Maybe it’s me ?

Yes. It was the fake-it-till-you-make-it lot that got very upset about Corbyn. Lots of tipping the head back with fake laughter at the idea of him becoming PM, which then lead into Prosecco fueled mouth frothing about communism and Russia. One bloke started to get quite upset about the idea of having to pay one member of staff an increased minimum wage. Even said he wouldn’t be able to keep them on (it was a Saturday job!). Interestingly though, I’ve found the people who’ve genuinely done well for themselves (hard job, high pay) don’t seem all that bothered who runs the country. I think they’re comfortable enough to weather most storms. It’s the ones who live their ‘wealthy’ life through debt that seem the most fearful of Labour. To answer the question of the OP, in my experience, yes, a vote for Tory is a vote to increase house prices.

From the people I speak to, in a Tory stronghold, I think the general consensus is: Vote Tory and keep your wealth, Vote Labour and lose it. Always a laugh to ask people where they think their kids are going to live when they grow up. You can almost hear their inner mental gymnast triple back-flip off the horse and smack into a wall of realisation.

Yup. As I’ve said on another thread; the role of a career politician is to open doors for their donors and fill their boots with the rewards during and after they’ve left politics. All the time donations exist, the corruption will never end. There are no consequences for politicians anymore. The party that wins the election is the one that was best at fooling the electorate into voting for policies that will never be fulfilled. The choice at the booth is one of choosing which lies you like the sound of most.

Looks like something from The Last of Us. Might want to sweep it for infected first. ?‍♂️

Exactly this. The role of the career politician is to unlock doors for friends and donors with promises of big rewards after they’ve left politics.

And that’s a problem in wider society too; no shame and no consequences anymore. I remember when people used to be embarrassed about not being able to handle their drink! Now, it seems it’s perfectly acceptable to get hammered and laugh while filming other people sliding down the steps of ‘spoons on a slick of your own vomit! I have been watching what they do, that’s why I’m so jaded. ?