To think people who own multiple homes have helped drive house prices out of reach?

I don't think so. I think that's a very small part of the market and, if anything, has decreased in number,

What drove house prices out of reach is greed. Pure and simple greed.

Because it used to be you had to get 20% deposit and could only borrow up to 4x salary.

Then banks got greedy and started offering 100% mortgages and up to 10x salary at one point.

So someone on say £30k could borrow £120k but had to have 20% deposit, so could buy a house for £150k
Then someone on £30k could borrow £300k.
So double the price of the house. Because there was more money, if you had a house lots of people wanted, they'd offer more because they could get more money from the bank.
That's what drove house prices up.

The market is capitalism.

I have a house I live in and an apartment that I rent. I inherited some money, had to do something with it, didn't fancy the stock market. I try to be an excellent landlord, and I set the rent below market value. Probably it contributes to house price increases in some way but I don't really feel responsible fur the entire housing market.

It doesn’t help but the number of second homes left empty is pretty low.

The bigger factor is the availability of debt. The average house price is 4 times the average couples income, which surprise surprise is the maximum banks will lend. Help to buy made this even worse.

Increasing the population by 10 million in 20 years without building extra homes means that the available homes are always affordable to someone.

A shame that Blair/Labour didn't give people the option to vote for more council homes and to stop/reverse the council house sell off!

I agree. I rent holiday homes in the UK for short breaks but never rent a "normal" home, i.e. a flat in a block or a house on a housing estate. I can't bring myself to support/encourage such greedy behaviour. We seek out farm/barn conversions (usually in the middle of nowhere), or converted railway carriages (or active railway stations), canal boats, etc. - the kind of place that people wouldn't/couldn't live in as their permanent home.

This country voted in millions for Thatcher when she promised to allow council houses to be purchased by tenants. “We” had a choice then, and we made it. The people’s self-interest and stupidity has got us where we are. There’ll be grandparents who bought their council houses complaining about the fact their own DGC can’t afford a home and can’t get a council
house, without ever seeing their own contribution to the state of things. After a long life as a labour voter in I longer give a crap about other people - my life has shown me (and I’m looking at Brexit, Farage, the Austerity Tory years) I’ve been a fool to want to try to make the country better for everyone.

If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck!

I think we'd all know what an "underoccupied" house looks like. And it's not faffing around the edges arguing about a spare room.

It's like the houses on my road, where there are old couples knocking about in huge 5 bedroom houses, our next door neighbour whose 85 shuffling around his 4 bedroom house. Yes, very rarely, a relative comes to stay, but that's just 1 more bedroom used. 2 or 3 bedrooms in each house are just storage of decades of assorted junk and clothes that don't fit. Not only that, but they all have huge unused gardens, double garages, 2/3 reception rooms, conservatories etc.

No one is arguing about the 2 bed semi with a spare room. They're talking about big houses with more rooms than the occupier will ever need, often deteriorating due to lack of maintenance, etc.

I agree. If everyone had one house and lived in it, a lot of problems faced by coastal communities would ease. You don’t need a spare house in Cornwall or Tenby or wherever which you only stay in three weeks out of the year. I mean, I’m sure it’s lovely and I’ve hypocritically used Air B&B myself but the wider costs to these communities aren’t worth it in my book.

They weren't daft, it was deliberate to enrich them and their friends, just like Blair's 50% push for universities which had enabled millionaires/billionaires to make huge amounts from real estate investments in Uni buildings and student accommodation. It's ALL intentional, politicians aren't as stupid as people think - they act stupid to give that impression and hide what's truly going on behind the scenes.

Individual property developers don't help, they have the cash ready to buy a doer upper and flip for huge profit.

I once had a spat with someone on a local page who was ranting that her adult children couldn't afford to buy in our town. I asked if she would be willing to sell her home below market value to enable such a transaction and she went mad!

A few comments later and it transpired she also had a second home in a popular tourist town which they used a couple of times a year. She refused to acknowledge that she had taken a home from a local there.

None so blind....

Well yes. There wouldn't be a private rental market if there wasn't multiple homeowners out there.

For a long time the rental market was a great way for landlords to make a lot of money. The government have only just started to put things in place to make it not as lucrative. But I would say since the 90s private landlords have had a good 25-30 years to build portfolios without having to pay much tax for the privilege.

Will the selling off of council homes and not enough new ones built, the private landlords have made more and more money.

Would you extend this to people living in social housing who have more bedrooms than they need? Families where the children have gone off to college or work but want to come home at weekends or in the holidays? I'm sure than many of us know of people living alone in 3 or 4 bedroom family social housing when their children have moved on and their partner has died.

I expect I'll be pilloried for saying this, but second home owners in many areas use the local shops and businesses and put money into the local economy. I know that there are some areas, totally dependent on the tourist industry, where virtually all the second homes are on the market now and nobody is even remotely interested in buying there - at any price. And before people tell me that prices are unrealistic, some sellers would actually be making very little profit on their properties at all.
One other thing worth saying is that some families don't take foreign holidays but stay in their second homes regularly instead, using local shops and businesses rather than spending thousands of pounds abroad once or twice a year. Many have to live in flats or small properties in urban areas for work, but live in their second homes when they can.

And the councils couldn't spend the money they got from selling on building more housing.

That would be ridiculous. I'd never be able to see my family if they didn't have spare bedrooms for me and the kids to stay in.

Owners of Airbnb and holiday homes definitely contribute to the problem. They buy up smaller cottages that lie empty for much of the year, depriving locals of much needed housing stock and driving up prices. Cornwall is a prime example.

Yes

They sold them with no intention of replacing them. Thatcher hated the idea of the state providing anything.

In areas like London, second (or vacant) homes are a huge problem, but the shortage of affordable housing is happening almost everywhere.

The problem goes back to the Thatcher government which sold council houses at cheaper prices than they could be built.

What about companies that literally own thousands of properties ... mainly Chinese money.

If you want rents to come down you need more landlords not fewer. If you want prices to come down then you need fewer landlords - but tenants will be screwed and rents will go up. Either way, landlords aren’t either heros or villains.

The main reason government doesn’t build social housing any more is the numbers don’t work. Construction costs and interest rates have both gone up so much that social rents don’t cover the cost of debt needed to finance construction.

Rents are astronomical & people struggle to save the large deposits whilst simultaneously renting.