If We Didn't Borrow Money To Buy Houses, They Would Cost A Fraction Of Todays' Prices.

[babesagainstmachines]

It's a nice sentiment, but if we didn't borrow money to buy houses, then everything would cost a fraction of today's prices, and everyone's wages would be a fraction of what they are as well. We would be no better off, because no extra wealth is created. It's just a side effect of an inflationary monetary system.

[General Melchett]

But, but, if people didnt spend their whole lives as debt slaves, how would the bankers afford their lifestyles and how would our betters control us all and make us do their bidding and do their work for them?

Know you place. Get real. And get debt-enslaved, you uppity serfs.

[50%deposit]

Nah that is the cost of building. Been quite a lot of chat on this forum around the costs. Never reach a consensus but somewhere between 40-80k seems the norm.

Thats bull as far as im concerned. How much does it cost to build a car? Yet we get them for £5k. Its called economies of scale. If you go to a builder that has just built and got all his stuff from B&Q then fair enough, but these big house builders can get stuff much cheaper. The point is thogh, houses should depreciate in value. A house build 100 years agao has NO basis in setting its value against building cost aas all the interested parties are dead. So cost of materials has fallen out of the equation. Mr Eric The Pebble is 100% correct, houses would be affordable if the evil money lenders did not allow us to bid each other into hideous debt.

Its just a shame he didn't use more colourful lettering.

[lowrentyieldmakessense(honest!)]

WHY DO WE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS???

WHY CAN PEOPLE NOT WAKE UP TO THIS? PEOPLE WILLINGLY FALL INTO THE TRAP - AND ALSO - CLEVERLY - THE MONEYLENDERS HAVE TURNED HOUSE "BUYING" INTO A PYRAMID SELLING SCAM WHICH - ONCE YOU "BUY INTO" IT - YOU WANT TO KEEP THE WHOLE "PRICES ONLY GO UP" BULLSH1T GOING...... BECAUSE YOU ARE NOW PART OF IT. THE NEW "BUYERS"/BORROWERS THAT WANT TO FOLLOW BEHIND ARE FORCED TO SLAVE MORE AND MORE OF THEIR LIVES TO JOIN IN ON THE "HOUSING LADDER"/SCAM.....

Weird, isn't it!?.......

because the bankers are evil

we have become a nation of debt slaves and they wanted it that way

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article10902.html

Money doesn’t grow on trees for most of America. We sit down at our kitchen tables and write out checks to the phone-company, electric company, credit card-company, mortgage-company, and auto finance company every month. We clip coupons and go to the grocery store every week to put food in the mouths of our children. This is what our parents did before us. We work 40 to 60 hours a week to pay these bills and feed those mouths. It’s not easy. We do it because that is what hard working American families do. We work hard, try to save some money for a rainy day and do the best we can. We had been taught that nothing in this world was free. We have been misled. If you were wicked, taking risks beyond the comprehension of average Americans and endangering the entire worldwide financial system, money does grow on trees and there is plenty for free. Money can be printed out of thin air by the wicked and doled out to the wicked. The definition of wicked is:

Evil in principle or practice; deviating from morality; contrary to the moral or divine law; addicted to vice or sin; sinful; immoral; profligate

To put it in the most basic terms, what has happened in this country in the last decade is that evil wicked people have attained positions of power in government, banking, and industry and have committed sins against humanity for their own glory and enrichment. Those who should have stood up to these evil doers are just as guilty as the engineer driving the train to Auschwitz. Albert Einstein understood this danger:

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.â€

There have always been evil people. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Bernie Madoff, Dennis Kozlowski, Charles Manson, Charles Keating Jr., Joe McCarthy, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, Jim Jones, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky come to mind. Some committed horrendous atrocities, others stole billions, others destroyed reputations, and others lived lives of decadence and immorality. The reason they are all household names is because they were able to commit their crimes because other people didn’t do anything to stop them. All of these men could have been stopped if citizens, coworkers, auditors, Prime Ministers, government regulators, Boards of Directors, Congressmen, or family members had been brave enough and moral enough to make a stand against their evil deeds. The one and only poem that ever made an impression on me in high school was The Hangman by Maurice Ogden. Below are the last stanzas. Evil can only flourish in society if we allow it to flourish. A society united against wickedness, dishonesty, corruption and wantonness could stand the test of time. I’m afraid our Great American Republic has allowed evil to flourish, and the hangman’s scaffold has grown to enormous proportions.

"You tricked me Hangman." I shouted then,

"That your scaffold was built for other men,

and I'm no henchman of yours." I cried.

"You lied to me Hangman, foully lied."

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye,

"Lied to you...tricked you?" He said "Not I...

for I answered straight and told you true.

The scaffold was raised for none but you."

"For who has served more faithfully?

With your coward's hope." said He,

"And where are the others that might have stood

side by your side, in the common good?"

"Dead!" I answered, and amiably

"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me.

"First the alien ... then the Jew.

I did no more than you let me do."

Beneath the beam that blocked the sky

none before stood so alone as I.

The Hangman then strapped me...with no voice there

to cry "Stay!" ... for me in the empty square.

THE BOTTOM LINE: "...I did no more than you let me do."

Hell is Empty and all the Devils are Here

Bill Shakespeare sure had a way with words. He understood the battle between good and evil on earth. He also understood that evil can span generations. “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.†The main stream liberal media scoff at the use of the terms evil, the devil, sin and wickedness. These are antiquated terms used by our grandparents. Everyone knows that we have progressed beyond such childish terms. The distinctions between evil and good have been purposely blurred by those in power. The ruling elitists prefer to operate in shades of gray, where right and wrong can be spun and parsed into legal mumbo jumbo. This is not as complicated as those in power want you to think. Our parents taught us right from wrong. Lying, cheating, stealing, swearing, and killing are wrong. It’s that simple. No gray, just black and white. As the mainstream liberal media is filled with vacuous, cheerleader ideologues, I prefer the wisdom of the greatest minds in history. Evil does exist in the words and deeds of men in government, banking, the media and corporate America today.

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.†Pearl S. Buck

There are many good people in our country. I would even venture to state that the overwhelming vast majority of our 306 million citizens are good people. The problem is that the good people have let their guard down and allowed evil men to prevail. By delegating their civic responsibility for their own well being to corrupt, power hungry, evil men, we have traded liberty and freedom for a false sense of security. The military industrial complex, healthcare industrial complex, media industrial complex and now the banking industrial complex and auto industrial complex are now in command of our lives. By following the false prophets of government solving all the ills of society, we have allowed the hangman’s gallows to grow and loom ever larger over our every day existence. The examples of evil infiltrating the halls of government, banking and industry are many.

[ccc]

Thats bull as far as im concerned. How much does it cost to build a car? Yet we get them for £5k. Its called economies of scale. If you go to a builder that has just built and got all his stuff from B&Q then fair enough, but these big house builders can get stuff much cheaper. The point is thogh, houses should depreciate in value. A house build 100 years agao has NO basis in setting its value against building cost aas all the interested parties are dead. So cost of materials has fallen out of the equation. Mr Eric The Pebble is 100% correct, houses would be affordable if the evil money lenders did not allow us to bid each other into hideous debt.

Its just a shame he didn't use more colourful lettering.

Well if you buy a car for 5k you can be pretty sure it costs less than 5k to produce.

Many builders have provided details of how much a house costs to build. Yes a lot of this is down to wages but nonetheless a 3 bed detached in this country, INCLUDING economies of scale, costs about 40-80k to produce.

Fine, take away the labour cost and it would be a hell of a lot less. However as I have said there is one fly in that ointment. People are too lazy.

[50%deposit]

Well if you buy a car for 5k you can be pretty sure it costs less than 5k to produce.

Many builders have provided details of how much a house costs to build. Yes a lot of this is down to wages but nonetheless a 3 bed detached in this country, INCLUDING economies of scale, costs about 40-80k to produce.

Fine, take away the labour cost and it would be a hell of a lot less. However as I have said there is one fly in that ointment. People are too lazy.

no way can you build a car for £5k. Get real. Just look at the raw materials. Weight of steel, aluminium, plastics, glass, rubber, just calculate the cost of all that, without any work done to it. That alone would cost £5k. They do it through economies of scale.

And house builders do the same.

Even man hours does not add up. It takes hours to make a car.

house builders are evil and drink blood with the devil during their tea breaks.

The thing with houses is the process cannot be as easily automated. With automation you can drive down labour costs.

We need to build robots that build houses, they we can fire all the bricklayers and builders. We could call this range of cyborgs HOUSINATORS and arm them with heavy machine guns, it will be awesome.

Edited May 31, 2009 by 50%deposit

[huw]

IF YOU HAD TO PAY FOR YOUR PROPERTY FROM YOUR POCKET - I.E. SAVINGS - AND THERE WAS NO INSITITUTIONALIZED AND TOTALLY FIXED SYSTEM OF "LENDING/BORROWING" MONEY BY THE BANKING VESTED INTERESTS - THE AVERAGE PROPERTY WOULD COST AROUND £20-30k.......

I agree with your main point but not with the above, at least not unless wages were also correspondingly lower. The price of a home can't fall below materials + labour + land. Instead, the price floor would be determined by rental yield. I also suspect that the average quality of properties might be even lower than at present, because they'd have to be built and maintained out of current resources, not by making promises to pay in future ... but I'm not sure about how the latter point would pan out in practice.

I'd be all for debt-free property myself though, I hate bidding with my hard-earned cash against people armed with the bank's money

[huw]

Thats bull as far as im concerned. How much does it cost to build a car? Yet we get them for £5k. Its called economies of scale. If you go to a builder that has just built and got all his stuff from B&Q then fair enough, but these big house builders can get stuff much cheaper. The point is thogh, houses should depreciate in value. A house build 100 years agao has NO basis in setting its value against building cost aas all the interested parties are dead.

Nothing has any business in setting its value against building cost ... value arises from the market, not from costs.

However in practice, nobody will build houses and sell them below cost. 100-year-old houses will sell in the context of the market so established (and they also benefit from the fact that nobody's making them any more )

[Beggar Thy Children]

no way can you build a car for £5k. Get real. Just look at the raw materials. Weight of steel, aluminium, plastics, glass, rubber, just calculate the cost of all that, without any work done to it. That alone would cost £5k. They do it through economies of scale.

come again?

[ccc]

no way can you build a car for £5k. Get real. Just look at the raw materials. Weight of steel, aluminium, plastics, glass, rubber, just calculate the cost of all that, without any work done to it. That alone would cost £5k. They do it through economies of scale.

And house builders do the same.

Even man hours does not add up. It takes hours to make a car.

house builders are evil and drink blood with the devil during their tea breaks.

The thing with houses is the process cannot be as easily automated. With automation you can drive down labour costs.

We need to build robots that build houses, they we can fire all the bricklayers and builders. We could call this range of cyborgs HOUSINATORS and arm them with heavy machine guns, it will be awesome.

Emm

And that is just the bit in bold !!

If a business uses economies of scale and it can sell a car for 5k and make a profit ? Then put simply that car cost them less than 5k to produce. Very simple logic.

Hoping for £20k houses is ridiculous IMO. And trust me I am all for cheaper houses.

[Wimbledon88]

My feeling is that houses (ie not FTB starter slave boxes) should cost around 3.5 times single median salary. FTB could start of with the flats which should be say 2x their salary so that over say 5 years they could pay off a good chunk of the mortgage, making it realistic to buy a house with a decent deposit and a 2.5x-3x mortgage.

I disagree with the honourable gentleman. The equivalent of THREE AND A HALF YEARS' WORK? You mean if you were to slave away for three years, say a thousand days, all you could build with your bare hands is one lousy house?!? My great grandfather built his own house from stone and I do not think it took him three years.

I remember when I was a nipper I could never understand what a "mortgage" was and why every family had to have one. And I did not understand why houses were so expensive. To my mind, the real "cost" of a house is about 5000 pounds and this is what it would be without all that Eric and everyone else has brought up, i.e. credit inflation.

[kara gee]

Yes, I think the term you're looking for there is........ a portacabin.

We can make cheap accomodation now. Have been doing so for decades. Remember those horrible pre-fab concrete council houses form the 60's, etc.

Designing cheap accomodation isn't a problem. Desigining cheap accomodation that is nice to live in, and durable enough to withstand our awful climate for hundreds of years, is more challenging.

Straw Bale? Cob? Earthships?

Some of the UKs oldest surviving dwellings are cob. All of the above can be built structurally cheaply, then fitted out to what ever specifiction suits your budget. Also they all have excellent U-values (super-insulating qualities) and the cob and earthships also have amazing thermal mass.

Any of these buildings if done properely ie, large south facing windows to maximise on solar gain, small north windows to minimise heat-loss, internall thermal mass walls etc. The best examples of these builds need very little heating through the year.

[ccc]

I disagree with the honourable gentleman. The equivalent of THREE AND A HALF YEARS' WORK? You mean if you were to slave away for three years, say a thousand days, all you could build with your bare hands is one lousy house?!? My great grandfather built his own house from stone and I do not think it took him three years.

I remember when I was a nipper I could never understand what a "mortgage" was and why every family had to have one. And I did not understand why houses were so expensive. To my mind, the real "cost" of a house is about 5000 pounds and this is what it would be without all that Eric and everyone else has brought up, i.e. credit inflation.

Where did he get the Stone from ? How did he cut it ? Where was the plumbing from ? Etc..

All of that had to be worked for in the first place. Even if a lot was bartered for I am sure maybe 3 years of effort was actually required to build a house.

And then you have the skills required to build a house yourself. How many years do they take to obtain ? Or do you just get someone to give you guidance ? If so then don't they expect to get paid for the skills they have learnt over years ?

Personally I think 3 years work and labour to have your own house 100%, whatever way you go about it, is fairly reasonable.

5K

That is what ? 2-3 months effort to fully build and own your own house. That is insane IMO.

[huw]

I disagree with the honourable gentleman. The equivalent of THREE AND A HALF YEARS' WORK? You mean if you were to slave away for three years, say a thousand days, all you could build with your bare hands is one lousy house?!? My great grandfather built his own house from stone and I do not think it took him three years.

Did he really do the whole thing himself? And I wonder how many man-years were embodied in the timber, slate and stone he used?

[HAMISH_MCTAVISH]

How much does it cost to build a car? Yet we get them for £5k. Its called economies of scale.

The point is though, houses should depreciate in value. A house build 100 years agao has NO basis in setting its value against building cost as all the interested parties are dead.

My house is around 100 years old, and it's still as good as the day it was built, actually much better given the various upgrades over the last century. It will last for hundreds of years more too, with routine maintenance.

Please show me a 100 year old car that has the same, or superior performance, comfort, durability as a car of today.

Also please show me a 100 year old, roadworthy car in immaculate condition that is worth less today then when it was built.

[kara gee]

Well if you buy a car for 5k you can be pretty sure it costs less than 5k to produce.

Many builders have provided details of how much a house costs to build. Yes a lot of this is down to wages but nonetheless a 3 bed detached in this country, INCLUDING economies of scale, costs about 40-80k to produce.

Fine, take away the labour cost and it would be a hell of a lot less. However as I have said there is one fly in that ointment. People are too lazy.

But again we hit the vicious circle. We're not ALL lazy, (well, a lot are) but we work obscenely long hours. When would we get the time to build our own house?

If we did have the time to build our own where would we get the money from for materials without a job?

[tim123]

The house builders require housing, the peopel who provide the materials need housing etc etc

housing should cost SFA

Why?

Because the taxpayer should subsidise it to that price, perhaps?

That's the only way, because it can't be achieved using sensible economics!

tim

[Wimbledon88]

Did he really do the whole thing himself? And I wonder how many man-years were embodied in the timber, slate and stone he used?

The story was this. He was employed by some lord to build his castle. The lord ran out of cash, so he paid the workers in granite. My great grandfather used the granite to build his house - which is still standing and will stand for another couple of centuries. I do not know the exact details, this was at the end of the nineteenth century, but I would reckon his fellow mates who worked on the castle all helped each other out. What is so difficult about it? I remember reading about how Pa built the little house on the prairie in basically a month! Three years if you want an architectural masterpiece with carytids and gragoyles and all that, but one house should only take about one year. And if you were building it yourself you can believe you would make a good job of it! It is like cooking meat - the end result is so much better when you do it yourself.

And the castle is still standing as well.

[ccc]

The story was this. He was employed by some lord to build his castle. The lord ran out of cash, so he paid the workers in granite. My great grandfather used the granite to build his house - which is still standing and will stand for another couple of centuries. I do not know the exact details, this was at the end of the nineteenth century, but I would reckon his fellow mates who worked on the castle all helped each other out. What is so difficult about it? I remember reading about how Pa built the little house on the prairie in basically a month! Three years if you want an architectural masterpiece with carytids and gragoyles and all that, but one house should only take about one year. And if you were building it yourself you can believe you would make a good job of it! It is like cooking meat - the end result is so much better when you do it yourself.

And the castle is still standing as well.

So he had to work for the raw materials. So it didn't take him a few months to build.

[Peter Hun]

I remember my parents buying a house in 1970, admittedly it wasn't top of the market, a Yorkshire stone 2 bedromm terrace in Bradford. It cost £50 and another £50 to install a new electric supply and rewire. We lived there for about 5 years before the council bought it for 'road widening'. There's an industrial estate there now.

In 1980 I bought my first place, a shop near Newcastle with a large flat above (2 floors plus attic). It needed some work such as rewiring, plumbing etc. which added a few hundred to the £3,500 I paid for it.

Moved about 2 years later as it was difficult for customers to park nearby. Next shop was £6000 (1982).

BTW those were the full cash price not the deposit

Well.. my parents bought a house in Shipley (Nab Wood) in 1973. £3500. 3bedroom semi-detached with garden.

£50 must have been cheap even at that time, but I lived in a similar house that was demolished with a load of others (entire streets disappeared). I think slum clearance may have been a better description.

[ccc]

But again we hit the vicious circle. We're not ALL lazy, (well, a lot are) but we work obscenely long hours. When would we get the time to build our own house?

If we did have the time to build our own where would we get the money from for materials without a job?

Exactly. A house that you own outright should take a serious amount of effort. As I have said 3 years seems reasonable enough. Although I suppose you have to count tax on top of that too.

In Edinburgh in 2007 average houses were costing about 9-10 times average salaries. That is insane. Just as insane as thinking 3 months work is all that is required for a house.

I think an average price for a decent Edinburgh house of 100-120k is reasonable. And I am about as big an Edinburgh bear as it is possible to get. So that just leaves about 40% more to fall around my way.

[Yorkshire Lad]

7k for a 4 bedroom house in Bulgaria.

http://promarkltd.co.uk/estate_agents/inde...amp;Itemid=9999

I know its another country, but it demonstrates just how stupid our housing based economy has become. A car in Bulgaria costs roughly the same as a house.

Edited May 31, 2009 by Yorkshire Lad

[pete.hpc]

Flatpack home for £9k

http://www.timbercabins.co.uk/helsinki.html

And building it;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/art...EALLY-easy.html

Edited May 31, 2009 by pete.hpc

[ccc]

Flatpack home for �9k

http://www.timbercabins.co.uk/helsinki.html

And building it;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/art...EALLY-easy.html

Nice.

[Wimbledon88]

Exactly. A house that you own outright should take a serious amount of effort. As I have said 3 years seems reasonable enough. Although I suppose you have to count tax on top of that too.

In Edinburgh in 2007 average houses were costing about 9-10 times average salaries. That is insane. Just as insane as thinking 3 months work is all that is required for a house.

I think an average price for a decent Edinburgh house of 100-120k is reasonable. And I am about as big an Edinburgh bear as it is possible to get. So that just leaves about 40% more to fall around my way.

Well, OK, a couple of years - at the very very most. But I remember seeing a house go up in a week when I was living on the outskirts of Prague. I don't remember saying three months, smart ass. Anyway, you forget about the division of labour. Form a cooperative with an architect, plumber, bricker, plasterer and that gives you five people, you could surely build five houses in five years. Of course, the problem now is land and planning permission and all that - which is all part of the process to discourage us. Also, if a man builds a house and has one son, the son gets the house for free, so he does NO WORK for it at all, so the average time to build it is effectively halved. I still say a house = a year's work.