definitelynotanagent

I'm assuming they didn't, where-as on our side we had to speak to the estate agent's preferred mortgage broker to verify finances (no pressure to take out mortgage with them, so I think it was genuinely a "check if they can afford it", vs a "let's get a kick back" type scenario). There's no way our buyer would have got an agreement in principle having been on furlough, so I'm thinking they just made that bit up, because they had other mortgages already and assumed they could get another one.

Random anecdote from myself. Agreed sale of the current house at end of lockdown (london suburb) - 500+k, to a buy-to-letter who apparently had a mortgage in place (already agreed in principle, allgedly). Agreed purchase of other place, and have so far spent roughly 3k on legal fees (sale + buy + home buyers survey + mortgage valuation). Unfortunately it seems the buy-to-letter now can't get a mortgage because they had furloughed themselves through lockdown (director), so I think they lied re the mortgage in principle... We didn't have any problems getting approved for an

Sure. If you were willing to accept those kind of offers you'd lower the price to increase viewings, instead of taking the few viewers aside and letting them know you'd accept 100k less. I call BS.

Actually that is not as crazy as it seems - I like these kind of real world metrics. Who eats TVs? Do you have any more products that you track? I don't know what compound official CPI from 2014 to today is, but I bet it's not 45%

for sure, but now I await messages like "the inflation rate is close to 0, so the MPC have some 'wiggle room' with QE measures"

The BBC (quoting ONS) are reporting UK inflation at 0.2% for August: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54173658 Given that the "target" is 2%, how will they achieve this in the near term future (I know they always miss..)? This might well be used as cover for a lot of printing, because someone has to pay for all those bounce back loans and furlough wages (savers, as always), but if things get really bad they might even post cheques out to everyone in the UK (ala the 'Trump cheque'). My personal suspicion/opinion is that the printers are currently having their ink cart

interesting re the salaries... I know a bunch of people who work in nail salons who claim to earn 'all the money' - 1500-2000 per week, but I just don't see how that would be possible... maybe if they owned the salons, but they don't, although I gather the know the owners well.

We're getting horrendously off-topic, but I'm currently doing some bench-marking on older HP blades (ca 2012) as compared to newer G9/G10 pizza boxes. The G10s are roughly 2x as fast to finish our test jobs and have lots more cores and RAM, but when you adjust for the cost per core, it turns out that it's cheaper to buy+run the used kit... Software takes care of the reliability aspect, as in, we don't even care if a blade fails because things just get rescheduled. If you just believed the benchmarks from the server manufacturers, you'd think the 2012 kit was totally rubbish and outdated.

Fair point about her, that's a lot of money to be spunking all on yourself.

It's easy - 100k after some pension contributions etc will get you less than 5k a month. Take away mortgage/rent of say 1700-2000, food+grocery shopping for a family of 4 at about 600-700 per month, council tax + other household bills ~400, and that's close to 3000 already. Add a couple of hundred for car insurance, tax, servicing, mot, petrol. Then add kids clubs, gym memberships, breakfast clubs + after school care (~600 pcm per child), and maybe some school fees 1k+ pcm per child. This doesn't even include a car. Now you're under water every month, without even going on holid

Actually I meant "Disgusting VI mouth peace!!!11!" 😁

What's this? I thought the BBC were supposed to be completely in the pockets of the landlords and the government, and never report any news that could be bad for house prices? Fuming!

Exactly this! Just because fundamentals "should" crash the market, it doesn't necessarily mean it will happen, and definitely not assured that nominal values will crash. People make the choice to buy for lots of different reasons, anf if enough of them decide to buy at high prices, then prices will rise and keep rising. Who was it that said that the market could be irrational for longer than you could stay solvent? The same thing could definitely be true for the housing market, except it'd have to be modified to be "the housing market can remain irrational for longer than you h

Something interesting about the graph there in late 2019/early 2020.. Mortgage approvals were on the up before lockdown. I wonder if we'd have seen a bit of a mini boom without lockdown? Maybe just related to the december election.

I think a lot of people think that the govt will do whatever it takes to keep house prices high, including helicopter money. If you believe that to be the case, in that scenario, it might not be so stupid to buy a house, as opposed to sitting on a pile of cash and paying rent.