Willy Weasel

Good grief - how many Stratfordians are on this site?

You mean RB lives in Stratford arggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sod houses being overpriced - I'm moving

Are we talking about Stratford, London or the REAL Stratford ie upon-Avon?

Because many people forget to remortgage (or just don't bother) when they come off their discounted rate and get put straight onto the SVR. The banks make a fair whack between people going onto the SVR and them remortgaging

My wife and I have had serious discussions about car sharing due to the effect increased petrol prices have on our finances. Presumably others will be forced to consider alternatives if the price gets too high and this will help restrict demand. This might also have the effect of easing pressure on prices. And reduced use of fossil fuels will help save the planet I'm off to hug a tree.....

Does anyone have info on the average wage multiple for joint applications?

I reckon the M4 could do with doubling to six lanes each way

Oh my God! I've just realised why RB displays such patience when dealing with criticism. He is displaying all the personality traits of a cult leader. He's brainwashing us all and then he is going to ask us all to sell our stocks on the same day so that he can invest after the resulting stock market crash! Run for your lives.... Wheres my tinfoil hat, he's reading my brainwaves as we speak...

Tuition fees was mentioned several times as a reason for putting the IR up this month but surely the BoE has known about that for months. It smacks of a scapegoat to me.

Please justify that comment. From a review of the thread, I'm the only one official stating bull or bear and I'm a bear. My comments about your sensationalist approach still stand. I agree with the others on this thread that we come to this forum to avoid sensationalist VI spin on either side of the argument. I'm starting to think you are on a one man crusade to lower asset and stock prices so that you can invest all that cash you say you are sitting on.

RB - you really are being disingenuous here. The best way to annualize something is to average out the figures for the last twelve months. I'm afraid the more I read your posts the more I become convinced that you have a personality trait to be the centre of attention by proclaiming news first and in a sensationalised way. Comments like "the FTSE has gone vertical" from this morning on a day when it has barely moved add nothing to the credibility of our cause I'm afraid

Doesn't the 1% fall already incorporate the 3% discount? In other words asking prices are discounted by 3% to produce house prices ie the actual selling price. It is this discounted figure that is 1% lower this month. RB - I agree with other posters that you cannot multiply a monthly change by 12 when it suits you. That would give a current range for annual HPI of about 30% ie either up 15% or down 15%

I act for a number of property developers and sales of new homes are certainly falling. The classic developer's trick to sell a house is to pay the Stamp Duty (now called SDLT by the way) and offer carpets etc. The reason the developer does this is to keep the headline price the same but this has the effect of skewing the average house price figures for new homes because the actual deal is usually 3 or 4% lower than the figure the Land Registry reports.

I've just finished reading the BoE report all the way through. The thread that seems to run through the report is that the BoE's IR decisions are dictated by people's expectations of CPI going forward ie if people believe CPI will be higher in the future then the Bank will raise interest rates until people's expectations are reduced. This is because expectations of higher CPI encourage people to ask for higher pay rises. The BoE seems to be taking quite a lot of comfort from the fact that wage settlements are very low so people don't have more disposable income so can't spend more which means retailers can't increase prices. The message from the markets is that a further 0.25% increase is expected so the Bank will make that increase in due course to keep the IR in line with market expectations. If the general expectations of CPI rise then that will be when we will see more aggressive IR rises but I don't see that happening soon (ie within the next 12 months)

What I meant was is a fixed better than the discounted rates that are always available

I'm afraid this is the old 'lies, damned lies, and statistics argument'. If you look at the volume of transactions data in the report you will see that in the last quarter the volumes for the very top of the market increased significantly and this has helped skew the average. For empiric evidence, just follow an area on rightmove for a while. My feeling is that in my area prices have fallen by about 5% this year

So far everyone seems to have become bearish between 2002 and 2004. I negotiated my house purchase in 2002 by successfully pursuading my Vendor that prices were about to fall so I guess I was bearish then (although I negotiated the price down from £135,000 to £120,000 so figured I'd got a pretty good deal). Does anyone think it would be possible to convert sentiment on this site into some sort of index?

Once the EAs realise that the market is stagnating they will go quickly into reverse gear because the one thing an EA needs is TURNOVER. Rising prices are great if they can keep their percentage the same but they still need houses to sell to make a commission. You might find EAs turn bearish very quickly to encourage buyers back to the market once the BTL crowd disappear

Not really - the thread contains a discussion of why the figures cannot be taken at face value. I live in Warwickshire and, apparently, in the last year the prices of flats has fallen by 9% according to the LR figures. That's no more accurate than the other examples of rising prices that you can take from the figures

To all those who accuse us bears of being doom-mongers, I would like to poll the bears by asking them to answer the question posed. If we can all establish when we were last bullish we can confidently rebut the allegation by showing our bearishness or bullishness depends on the prevailing economic conditions, not on our personalities

The problem with mass immigration is that it brings public services to their knees and results in the exacerbation of the division of society along racial lines

I'm surprised you think that the biggest threat to world peace is irrelevant to the global economy (and therefore house prices)

Mr Clown is a devotee of Post Neoclassical Endogenous Growth Theory and therefore believes that he has to spend to keep the economy growing.

I thought not

I joined the forum after the hack and the day after registration received the first spam emails I have ever had. I'm sure this is not coincidence so can only assume that either Rich is correct or that the security of the site's database continues to be compromised