VacantPossession
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Posts posted by VacantPossession
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Outrageous propaganda that a six year old child could see through. Unfortunately adults are much more gullible.
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I think the flaw in the OP's opening gambit is consulting EA's in the first place. An EA is there to SELL you something, therefore any "advice" he gives is by definition not reliable. I would never, ever, consult an EA about anything to do with property, apart from using them if necessary to visit a prospective house - as long as they kept their mouth shut unless invited to talk.
Sounds a bit harsh I know, but after many years of EA bulls()it I just cannot stand the patter any longer. The best way to overcome this is to keep them quiet so they don't pollute your mind with VI nonsense. I apply the same principle to car dealers. It really does make for a better quality of life.
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So what are you saying. Let's just not bother? We have to start somewhere.
Sure, we need to bother. What I object to is bogus green products that simply are not so. And if for example you were to sit in front of your TV for one hour and watch commercial channels, I am willing to bet that approaching half of all corporate type adverts will have a green logo, or mention the word "green", "environment", "energy saving", "looking after the planet", and a lot of other nonsense which bares no relation whatsoever to what they are peddling.
The "green" thing has become a giant excercise in band wagon climbing, lies, deceit and dishonesty. Genuinely "green" companies and manufacturers probably represent less than 1% of the total. It is all PR nonsense.
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UK backs Blair for Eu president
All political careers end in failure, apparently. But there always seems to be a line up of big fat jobs at the end of it. Bad enough that the Kinnocks long ago abandoned their ideals for a very large salary and freebies galore, and now Blair, with his relentless narcissism and greed for cash and status. I despair.
Will just ONE politician ever simply retire gracefully to an allotment in Dorset? Probably not.
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France, relative to many anglo-saxon countries have a "borg-like" approach to immigration, ie, assimilation. No such nonsense as "tolerance" like you have here. You come to France, you must accept French way of doing things, no building mosques taller than the local church spires, and no burqas. I just do not see the logic of allowing foreigners to come to the UK and expect them not to blend in? "
The problem is, that the concept of "assimilation", though I'm sure a genuine desire in your case, often becomes a euphemism for intolerance. I agree on the burqa issue, on balance, because it represents a fundamental repression, based on an essentially male dominated chauvinism. But even then, I think it can backfire to ban these things.
We also have to accept that if we insist on cultural assimilation, we need to examine and somehow explain why for over two hundred years, we Brits flooded the world with our own people, took over their countries entirely and pretended we were living in little England even when residing in a jungle. If assimilation is a desirable thing, then we are not a very good example of it, and still are not:
One of the most depressing things to witness is the wholesale and stubborn refusal of our ex pats in the costas of Spain to assimilate in to the Spanish way of life. There are an enormous number of brits permanently living in Spain who cannot even speak a single sentence of Spanish! If you want the best example of abject failure to assimilate you have no further to look than ourselves!
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There is indeed a population problem. There are simply too many people in not just the UK, but the whole of Europe. But that is not just because of immigration, and it really is time people balanced their immigration paranoia with at least a brief mention of the fact that milllions of Brits work and live abroad. You cannot have it both ways.
Estimates vary, but between 4 and 5 MILLION uk citizens have emigrated or permanently live not in their native country. Before we start closing the gates, we have a somewhat hypocritical situation to be addressed. If you want to batten down the hatches then you might consider that others will do the same, which means theoretically 4 Million ex pats will have to return.
Instead of blaming everything on immigration, it would be wiser to address the long standing statistics that there are too many people to sustain a decent quality of life and achievable wealth and happiness. But successive British and European governments have promoted the notion that a high population is necessary for a healthy economy. This is of course nonsense and they only promote this myth in order to sustain the debt ridden paradigm and keep wages down. It is also an unsustainable short term answer to the misplaced claimed need to constantly increase output and manufacturing in order to feed the increasing demand caused by unrelenting population growth. It is this spiral that will be our downfall, not immigration per se.
If I was forced to look at lowering population levels in the UK, the first area I would examine would not be the influx of former Iron Curtain citizens but our own indigenous population increase, mixed into which are a couple of million ill educated, defeated, low esteem people who by bad luck or inadequate upbringing, become permanently reliant on the state, and represent a large proportion of those turning to crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, violence and antisocial behaviour.
It is our own population that needs, more than any other category, to be restricted. The vast majority of visiting immigrants, permanent or temporary, work hard and do not rely non the state.
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Even if Green is the next bubble, at least it won't be as damaging as the housing bubble was.
While I'm sure business will exploit the whole thing. It will at least help stabilise the climate, and encourage a more sustainable and less wasteful lifestyle.
I think that's a big statement of over confidence. Manufacturing of "green" products is itself a not very green activity. Take the Prius hybrid car. It is relentlessly promoted as "green" but there is absolutely nothing green about it. Saving on just petrol consumption does not make a car green. The manufacturing process of the Prius, and its high cost, already makes it an inefficient process. The gains in the part battery power are wiped out by its production costs and production materials which themselves call upon wasteful and Un green processes. Now if Toyota were to make a small, light, efficient and cost effective car that might be a stretch be described as "green".
Nearly every product that is promoted as being green is nothing of the sort. It has to be remembered that the manufacturing of almost every green product you see is itself a non green process.
Back to cars: If you have a reliable ten or fifteen year old car and it has running almost trouble free, the best way to be green is to hang on to it. But our government wants to penalise old car owners in order to persuade them to buy a new, "green" car. This is nonsense. The production process of a new car, however "green" it claims to be, will always create more overall pollution than holding on to an old vehicle.
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All these ridiculous feel good statements represent the bull trap phenomenon translated to politics, media and corporate delusion. How can a nation up to its eyeballs in debt claim that recovery is on the way? This palpable nonsense is sadly not just a deliberate and massaged lie issued with a regularity which suggests the masses are yet again being spoon fed deceit of the highest order, but it indicates that no lessons have been learned by anyone with power and influence.
The assumption seems to be that since talking up the market in the boom period generally succeeded...for a limited time...the same method can now be used all over again.
The dangerous thing about these absurd statements is that, despite being duped already, I feel certain the majority of undiscerning, uncritical, unaware people (ie: 90% of the UK population) are going to be taken in yet again.
Naivity seems to have no boundaries anymore. Any old "expert" spouting rubbish that shafted everyone first time round seem to be as active now as they were when they were telling people that their property was "safe as houses". Why don't people EVER learn?
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Mixed quality I thought, but in the main good. Two major points it missed:
Sub Prime is a convenient focus for the drama, but in fact it is conventional mortgages, and not just the greed of bankers, but the greed of ORDINARY people, that has precipitated the meltdown as much as sub-prime scams. I'm a bit fed up with programmes and media articles that exclusively blame US-led sub-prime, bankers and brokers. It gives the impression that the only guilty parties are those separate from the individual owners whose greed, equal to that of the industry movers and shakers, also contributed to the meltdown. That includes anyone buying for profit, BTL buyers, and others duped by the hype. They all share the guilt.
Secondly, the security guard was just a little too naive to be entirely convincing.
The best bit for me was the green twist at the end. For a long time I've thought the green bandwagon, now the biggest and ghastliest cliche ridden corporate band-wagon of all time, exceeds even the excesses of the banking debacle. If I see any product that is promoted as being "green" that instantly provokes a decision never to buy it. There is no such thing as a "green" product. The only green product is one that was never made.
The green twist also, rather accurately, demonstrated that a spiv is a spiv, whatever the circumstances and whatever the climate. They are irretrievably so and probably beyond change.
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It's not surprising that barely a single country is immune to HPI. Among the developing nations who have climbed on the bandwagon, with disastrous results, is probably a catastrophic misunderstanding of the paradigms which they feel define their perception of new freedoms. A classic example are the former Eastern Block countries which, like Russia, have abused the welcome political freedoms in order to go economically from one extreme (state control) to another which is arguable worse for those not quick or greedy enough to react in time (corporate and mafia control).
The result is that, if anything, the meltdowns these countries are now experiencing are even more of a disaster than the established Northern European states are experiencing. Instead of using the new freedoms as an opportunity to construct a fairer nation with better distribution of wealth, and the putting in place of solid institutions which respect the economic rights of everyone, these nations have now largely been taken over by thugs and spivs who have cashed in on the now gaping loopholes, and in the process they have ruined it for everyone else.
The end result is that there is now effectively not much difference between the former criminals who ran state monopolies and the new breed of corporate criminals who are doing the same job with even more profit for themselves than before. For the average citizen, the outcome is roughly the same: Poor infrastructure, poverty and one nasty heirachy replaced by yet another.
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Jonathan Blain is the Founder and Creator of "Extreme House Selling".
* He is a Property Selling Strategist
* He is a highly experienced business leader in many different roles including nearly five years a CEO of Quoted PLC
* He had considerable experience of adversity in life and business
* He is a genuine pioneer and thought leader - an international best selling business author with $3.8 million sales
* His work has previously been endorsed by nine CEO's of UK Top 1,000 companies and the Director General of the Institute of Directors
* He has had over 20 years sales and marketing experience including owning a sales training organisation
* He is a professional, business, motivational and inspirational speaker
* He appears in the media regularly including national TV
* Jonathan is a Leader in Disruptive Innovation
What a marvellous list of hilariously pretentious utter rubbish. This should be in pseud's corner at Private Eye. What the hell is a "leader in disruptive innovation"? A load of old bo()ocks. Anyone who describes themselves as a "motivational and inspirational speaker" deserves to be lampooned into oblivion. No wonder he can't sell. In times of financial stress the last thing anyone needs is this total claptrap. It was bad enough when the boom was on.
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Telegraph July 11th - see front page of HPC today.
Pockets of the country - including London, Oxford and Cornwall - are seeing a buoyant market as buyers fight to secure the best properties amid one of the most dramatic shortages of homes for sale in three decades.Buyers fighting eh? Well no, not really, as we learn later:
At the (Savilles) estate agency's branch in Oxford, one in 10 properties is selling above the asking price while at its Truro branch, buyers have been queuing at the door before it has even been opened.Really? Queuing at the door? This is outrageous spin. If one in 10 properties is selling above asking price that means that 9 out of 10 of them are either selling below asking price or equal to it. So this NON news is now being reversed to make it sound like suddenly the market is taking off. The polar opposite is true. It is neither taking off nor are their queues. I know this because my spies tell me that almost every agent office in Truro is mostly empty except for the odd negotiator filing their nails or pretending to look busy while serving precisely no-one in the branch.
Despite the fact that the fundamentals underpinning the market as a whole haven't shifted significantly, this has meant the sudden arrival of a glut of buyers hot on the heels of a period when little stock has come to the market. This has resulted in competitive bidding and, in some cases, a spike in values.A glut of buyers? Competitive bidding? They have to be joking, and of course they are. But at least they admit:
However, there are fears that the mini boom will not last as a supply of repossessed properties is unleashed onto the market.When activity increases very slightly and prices wobble a little for a limited period within an overall trend, this is now described as a "mini-boom". You've got to hand to them....they'll grasp on any glimmer of blue sky in between the thunder clouds. Quite sad really.
And finally, RICS returns to b()llshit mode right on queue:
The inventory of property on estate agents books has fallen sharply as the pick-up in buyer interest has failed to be matched by an increase in new instructions. The result of the mismatch between demand and supply has been to provide some support for house prices at a point when the economic climate is still quite challenging.Actually it's fallen not sharply, but a little bit from its all time highest supply values for decades. But RICS is trying to persuade you that this means there is a "shortage". Absurd, dishonest spin of the kind we come to expect.
Don't be fooled by all this rubbish. The trend is still down, and will remain so until the last of the barely started repossessions is cleared away, and until employment stops falling, and until UK debt levels, still the highest in Europe, begin to show signs of correction. That is still a very long way off. Beware of these fairy stories....we've hardly entered the jaws of recession, let alone come out the other side.
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Surely an estate agent has no duty to a tenant whatsoever.
The landlord should have told him, although if it doesn't affect the tenant, in any material way, I don't see the problem.
Not having a direct relationship with a third party does not excuse the agent if he acted in a way that connived with the Landlord in keeping the tenant out of the loop, or in negligently failing to establish whether the Landlord had any commitments which impacted on a third party. It has been established in law that the concept of duty of care can go beyond the relationship between two primary parties if other parties are damaged by that relationship.
A duty of care is also not necessarily defined as only being between parties who have a financial relationship. It depends how wide ranging or severe the consequences to third parties might be. But it is now clearly established in TORT that a agents DO indeed have a duty of care to others.
The Australian regulations on property agents' conduct firmly set out the parameters for the scope of duty of care, and though perhaps UK law might not be quite so clear cut, I would guess a bit of delving into past cases would reveal the same. It is the PROXIMITY of third parties affected by an agent or Landlord's actions that holds the key, not merely the contractual relationship between just two parties. It can be established that if an agent did not make sufficient enquiries to check on the status of a given property, including whether it was subject to a valid and running lease, then the agent would be in breach of his duties to a third party if that third party was damaged or disadvantaged.
Seems reasonable to me.
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+1,
spot on.
Yep. Dear Vince knows exactly what is going on but daren't say it lest the Liberal spin meisters flog him with a wet flannel. No politician is allowed to say what we all know is true: Injecting tax payers' cash into the black hole just creates a bigger black hole. I think perhaps more than 80% of the population of HPC all agreed on this right from the beginning. But outside these portals it is almost a subject of faith. To deny the existence of a tangible bail out is rather like standing up in a catholic stronghold and declaring aetheism.
Thus the nation holds on desperately to this pathetic myth that stuffing endless cash into the economy will save it, and the press dutifully follows, with rare exceptions. Just how deep this is now etched into the veins of nearly every person in the UK is easily seen. Just argue against the myth and you will be shouted down as being a negative and cynical luddite. No-one wants to face the truth.
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Why does the behaviour of one incompetent agent in one office suddenly merit all estate agents being labelled with your generalisations.
Because, generally speaking, it is probably true
And the agent wasn't incompetent. The agent was immoral, discourteous and completely disinterested concerning the consequences for the tenant.
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My scrolling finger is even now negotiating with it's agent about a major role in a motion picture, so mighty an appendage has it become during the course of this thread.
Agreed. This is absurd. Snip the darn thing!
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Gavin Esler's voice went up a few octaves as he ejaculated praise all over an embarrassed MPC groupie Blanchflower.
"You were right [about interest rate cuts], mervyn king was wrong!" proclaimed Esler, spurting his love all over the big studio monitor.
"I was all for interest rate cuts and quan-tee-tate-ive easing right from the start" cooed Blanchflower back
"So interest rate cuts and QE are working to help the conomy now?" soothed Esler, pupils dilated
"Absolutely!" enthused Blanchflower, stroking his thigh
Well Gavin, if you've got to ask...
Looks like a typical disaster to me - seems to be going well then caboom. Hope I'm wrong, inflation aint no joke.
I hope I understand you correctly here. I'm putting faith in your view that this interview completely passed the litmus test of conventional wisdom and confirms the BBC's position on interest rates: ie. that somehow putting them down solves anything. And I'm also assuming that you therefore think, as I do, that far from putting them down, the BOE should have put them up to at least 8% or more when it realised the British economy was beginning to be based entirely upon property speculation as a substitute for real wealth creation.
Am I right so far?
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fine, I'm off to find a tyre
No. By suggestion this you are worse than those you criticise. Why not adopt the manners of those wonderful nice ladies who discover a downed Luftwaffe pilot in WW2 in their adjacent field. He stands up, alarmed, and declares: "please do not shoot me. I am a prisoner of war and an ordinary German, Please don't kill me."
The response is: "Dear me, calm down. We don't do that to people here. Come up to the cottage. I'm sure you are dying for a nice cup of tea."
No matter the crime, you have to give people an avenue through which to expunge the past.
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I want to make clear that I am completely against banning Sibley. There is nothing worse than banning an opposing view, and many opposing views are subsequently proved to have been valid, just as we are fighting against the absurd conventional wisdom about property. But some people post merely to wind up and not to contribute an intelligent view, even if the tide of intelligence and common sense is engulfing them.
So I do not want to ban him at all. I just think that people rise to a self-conscious bait and fall right into his hands.
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I suggest a programme called Money Supply Watch. It would monitor closely the growth in the UK money supply and highlight the leading role in this process played by the housing market.
People should be made acutely aware of how they are forced to borrow into existence at interest the overwhelming bulk of their very means of exchange.
This is now the primary function of the housing market, far removed from the straightforward provision of decent affordable homes for the general population.
The housing market is the principal driver of a monetary system that enables the essentially unproductive banking and financial services “industries”, with the collusion of a parasitic political class, to continuously skim enormous wealth from productive society.
That is why it is ramped incessantly.
I can't be bothered to read subsequent posts, but that pretty well sums it up beautifully. I think that is all we need to know and congratulations for posting a terse and cogent assessment which is spot on.
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I'll take a punt on Mandelslime finding a way of claiming twice or thrice owing to his complicated position as a Lord, minister and former EUrocrat.
Even if current "punts" fail, there are enough past "punts" to ensure that, under any sane constitution, this ghastly man would not have been able to re-invent himself four times. But unfortunately, this creep of a human being is able to persuade his entire workforce to assemble like a congregation of primary school kids and bribe them into applauding him (an historic first) when he first arrives at his place of work, after a glittering career in mind control, manipulation and deceit, and dutifully they all turn out at the lobby of his ministry and clap like seals as he enters the building.
The sad thing is that he actually believes this PR stunt really does persuade us that he is any different from the utterly ghastly, greasy pole climbing, ambition-above-all-else individual that he is. And the only reason I am not being arrested for saying so is that almost everyone in Whitehall, 10 Downing Street and the entire civil service, agrees with me.
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Oh and I forgot to say. Rising to Sibley's bait just makes him feel all nice inside. Ignore this King Canute of property and he might go away. Responding to his posts only encourages him to pour yet more rubbish upon you. Please ignore - best policy.
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Sorry to say this - but just HOW THICK can people be? The answer is that they can be dumber than you ever imagined. This trick has been played since time began. It is the classic bull trap. But nowadays it goes further than mere delusional sheeplike fantasy dreams. It is fuelled by vested interests so desperate they will take a barely flickering candle and present it as a million kilowatt arc light.
This is nothing but a brief twitch of the eyelids before yet another EA dies on the slab. We are in for a long haul and anyone that pretends otherwise is stupid, irrecoverably naive and beyond hope.
Property has barely started its long and overdue journey towards sane affordability.
Amazon Retail. Falling Through The Floor.
in House prices and the economy
Posted · Edited by VacantPossession
Badly organised eh? Well, anyone who has read my posts over the years will know how cynical I am about most giant retail outfits but I can only judge on empirical evidence in this case.
In the last three years I have ordered a large range of items from Amazon UK, from computer parts, to books, music scores, DVD's, cameras and all sorts of other stuff. Not one item failed to arrive. Nine out of ten of them arrived next day, and of those, even the ones I ordered at more or less 5 pm arrived, neatly packaged, at 8.30 am the next day, including on a Saturday.
No other online retailer has come close. So what do you see as badly organised that I see as outstandingly well organised and a totally reliable service? And it's not just me. Everyone I know has a similar experience. Credit given where credit due.
You say "excessive" staffing levels. Maybe in fact the levels are just right, and contribute to the fact that I get my goods on time and with a flawless service.
Here's a snapshot of reviews. Seems they all agree with me: http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews105979.html