Avoid the popular

Checking through Rightmove to see just how much/little 1/4 of a million pounds gets you in Edinburgh commuter land and found this facinating development site plan. Site Plan I would *really* advise avoiding plots 111 and 112 if you or your beloved's name is Clementine....

I think moving to fixed price matters because it takes away the hassle of the offers over system to the buyer. The price is exactly what is specified and you can judge if it is a "fair" market value and what size of mortgage you'd need. A lot of Offers Over prices are set lower to get more people interested i.e. a friends flat was for sale at offers over 132k actually went for 187k (bought 8 years ago at 56k!) It's a lot of hassle and possible expense with surveys to lose out over and over and over with the other risk of paying 10's of thousands more than you need to to secure the house. So Fixed Price opens it out to a pool of frustrated folks who want a house but are unable or unwilling to compete in the "Offers Over" auctions. My own view is that in a downturn, fixed price will be the most popular way of trying to sell a house in Scotland.

I think Musselburgh is pretty daft as well to be honest - these are all fixed prices. http://www.espc.com/EspcPublic/UniversalPa...aspx?rid=239780 http://www.espc.com/EspcPublic/UniversalPa...aspx?rid=239187 http://www.espc.com/EspcPublic/UniversalPa...aspx?rid=239173 http://www.espc.com/EspcPublic/UniversalPa...aspx?rid=237648 http://www.espc.com/EspcPublic/UniversalPa...aspx?rid=240940 Pretty expensive for a place that's 45 mins on the bus away from the centre of Edinburgh and at the wrong end of the bypass for the Gyle/Edinburgh Park.

Eggs are a bit boring, why not blow bubbles at him? Imagine a picture in the papers of Gordon Brown surrounded by bubbles

"New" Labour summed up in a sentence - no principles that can't be bought, it's all about taking and retaining power. Thankfully they are on the way out, starting in the Lying Scotsman's backyard on May the 3rd.

You've obviously never been anywhere near Lochgelly then. Think very very distressed former mining village - more Buckfast than Starbucks. It does have a train station with a connection to Edinburgh but I think that it's probably not commuters settling there - it's probably people from Dunfermline (the local market town)who have been priced out by Edinburgh commuters.

You should have stopped after the first four words. Could you buy your house now?

Are you trying to undermine your own argument? The figures you've given are interest rate neutral compared to the current environment. Yet, taking the Nationwide's figures for Scotland as an example, the average price of a house is 126% more now than in 1999. "the public sector is where wage rises are at" - Really? can you prove that? Raises enough to keep up with HPI? Tell that to Nurses who got a below inflation pay rise this year and who's rises are generally based on CPI.

Why don't you work it out yourself? My own thoughts are that yes, in my area, until roughly end of 2002 (when the debt taps really opened) a Policeman and probably a Nurse would be able to "afford" a house.

I wonder how much worse the figures would have been like if they'd used the "historic" 3.5x multiple + a bit for a deposit. Even though the figures have been sexed-down as much as possible they still make shocking reading. 99% of towns in Britain are too expensive for Nurses to buy a house at a 4.46 multiple FFS! No wonder they are bugging out to Oz/NZ/Canada and the NHS is forced to plunder nurses from the third world to fill the gaps. Welcome to 21st Century Britain

Or you can pay £12.50 and use your mobile phone as a modem on t-mobile web & walk. Just connect from your laptop via bluetooth. I think you get about 3Gb of data in a month, surely enough for general browsing. I think you can probably do this with PAYG as well so you don't even need a "fixed" address.

Erm... Does she think that's "normal"???

Any reasoning behind that or was that written because it sounded good? As part of the survey/valuation before "buying" my house(in 2002) it gave the cost to rebuild the house from scratch. It was 56k Now people are buying these houses for 145k+ I'd say that if the price paid for houses was anywhere near the "build/replacement" cost then people on 15k a year would certainly be able to be owner occupiers.

Eh? How exactly do people pay their taxes to support this person? He seems to be a taxpayer and pays a rent which covers the cost of the house. Just because he has a better situation than most (and one that was very common until right-to-buy kicked in) don't come down on him. I'd much rather see empty buy-toilets used to house people who are locked out of the current housing market/scam than throwing people out their homes because they aren't poor enough!

A service-sector job generally carried out by a Polish person (in person) or an Indian person (over the phone)