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I would like people to post all the factors they believe have affected house prices in the past, and will in the future, and attribute a sort of proportion to each factor. I'd like you to do it with just two headings too, Demand and Supply Let me start (based on what I have learned on HPC and I hope that people will add to this until we all sort of agree, and perhaps learn some new ways of thinking about this issue. And I know this isn't a linear relationship, nor is this ever that simple, but just assume it's present day and that the relationship is super simple for ease of discussion. Supply of houses for sale Too few new houses coming onto the market - 75% Difficulty of finding large plots for development in desirable areas - 10% Oligopoly of house builders with high barrier to entry, due to costs and regulations - 10% Vacant properties staying unused and general occupancy rate issues - 5% Demand of houses to buy Ease of available credit - 40% Help to Buy - 5% Growing population - 40% Buy to let 15% I'd love to hear what other people think, as I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, and I'd like to try and graph a relationship between all the factors. If you disagree, please state the change in % you think is needed. TBP

Greetings HPCers! Thanks for adding me into the forum. Much has been said about how a fundamental underlying lack of supply will continue to keep housing prices up in London & SE. Don’t get me wrong – I think the nefarious activities of the builder/developer cartel do much (like De Beers with diamonds) to create artificially high prices. i.e. there is a sense in which there IS a genuine lack of supply. However, how much of this ‘lack of supply’ of stock is just down to vendors either taking their properties off the market or refusing to put them on the market in the first place (despite a desire to move home)? i.e. is there a solidarity among homesellers, who, refusing to accept that the end of the bubble has arrived, are determined to hold out through the wishful thinking of the market picking up again in the near future? What happens when some critical trigger breaks this stalemate up? I remember the recent nature documentary which followed the annual thawing of some frozen waterfall in North America. Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s it was very high interest rates and job losses that FORCED reluctant vendors to sell for WHATEVER PRICE THEY COULD GET. What will it take this time, and WHEN will it happen, that enough sellers break ranks and realise that it’s better to sell now than to sell in an even weaker market a year or two down the line? What will all of this do to the illusion of lack of supply in the prevailing theory of housing market 'experts'? [BTW, thanks go out to the HPC community for introducing me today to Property Bee on Firefox. Anyone still not using this browser plugin for Rightmove, install now!] J

This clearly illustrates how stock levels have fallen. Here is a graph of houses for sale on Rightmove from 3 estate agents in my area, it runs from July 2014 to the current day. The estate agents are Taylors, Connells and Derek Spires in Bearwood. Taylors started off as Taylors but it morphed into Humberstones quite a while back. I've shared the raw numbers too, should someone find this interesting. estate.txt estate.txt