To think house prices need to go down

Yes, it can happen. Loads of people who would otherwise be upsizing with their equity don't do it. Fewer starter homes available. I have a friend who ended up having 3 kids in a 2 bed flat due to negative equity and moved when the oldest was 10 in around 2019.

My point was really regarding FTB who want a crash so they can get on the ladder but as this poster says they end up staying with mum and dad, or renting, if there are few properties available.

The whole debt ladder is funded from the bottom, as that source of funding (new entrants to the market taking on mortgage debt) dries up the whole structure starts to move lower in price, each rung has to drop to the new price level dictated by interest rates/mortgage debt costs.

If you want to move up the ladder, the rungs have got further apart so you need to find more money to fund the gap between old and new house. You only release that if you downsize/move to a cheaper area.

Yes, they are always very careful to pretend that the high prices are normal, unavoidable, the result of "supply and demand" or some other banker created meme,it becomes quite obvious and ridiculous after a while especially as they have been chuntering on about "mass building programs" for 20 years, this will never ever happen because it would cause the market to completely crash and it really isn"t needed, the problem is/was too cheap credit for too long.

I think prices stopped climbing some time ago, sales and mortgage approvals are definitely down, BOE appears to be mucking about in the yield curve today trying to get borrowing costs down a bit, difference between now and 2008 though is that back then all the global central banks were on the same page to get rates down, things have diverged a bit since then on their policy aims.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/17/bank-of-england-bond-sales-plan-gilts-treasury-public-finances

Yes, and that bit in the middle is the bit that needs to be unwound, by a sharp price correction, before things can start to trundle along again.

So you think the whole market would freeze over, like a pond in winter type thing? That is just not how a market works, and it has never ever happened before, why would it suddenly happen now? You also have to remember that many people bought many years ago, they can afford to make deep price cuts to get a sale if they have to move for whatever reason, and even if the whole market froze, FTB would just continue living wherever they live now.

True, and they also built too many sky box type apartments in especially London, no one is going to attach themselves to that with a large mortgage debt anymore.

Interestingly, house prices have roughly tracked gold in inflationary terms over the past 50 years. There have been spikes above that, such as in the early 2000s, but then if you take prices now and 20 years ago, the growth isn’t much more than inflation. The problem is wages have not kept pace, so we are are effectively doing the same jobs for less money. If we compare wages here with the US, they were almost the same at the start of the century. Now Americans are considerably better paid because their wages have kept pace and ours haven’t.

Well... If houses crash, people stop selling. I bought a 2 bed in August 2008 age 24. We were in negative equity for almost 5 years. Then there's nothing for the FTB to buy.

You've missed out the much easier bit in the middle. There were 100% and even 125% mortgages available in the 00s! Then even when they went, a decade of zombie interest rates.

yabu because it’s never been easy to buy a house. When I’m bought (90’s) wages were far lower, no minimum wage, you could only borrow 3x your salary, and you could generally only afford a tiny flat in a not nice area at first. My dd has just bought, same age as I was, but she bought a house

Definitely. It's another reason the ladder concept isn't there like it used to be anymore. If you're not buying until well into your 30s, a one bedder is less likely to be practical for you.

I think people being older when they can buy also messed up the ladder.

My IL bought very young and traded up till Dh was late teen he'd lived in four houses. They seemed very put out we were buying a family home as our first as we were early 30s with two kids.

Raw materials are expensive. Land is expensive. Wages are expensive. A fall in house prices would disincentivise the major land builders from building as there is increasingly little profit in it for them and increasingly to much risk. As it is they get cropped by having to provide affordable homes, planning costs and possible judicial reviews into planning etc. The Gov does not have a pit of money to invest in a large house building programme.

Also a significant fall in house prices would cause a bank crash and a recession that we have not seen in a lifetime.

Many people would not even keep their jobs.

The ladder was more of a thing when a flat was a popular choice as a starter home before there was broad awareness of the problems with being a leaseholder and before Covid. Now, flats all over the country are languishing on the market for ages.

The ladder is a myth, it is a debt ladder, easiest way out is a price crash.

Not entirely true, I'm sure many with pricy homes would benefit from lower inheritance tax.

I still think high deposits and mortgage costs are the true barrier.

Get on the ladder earlier and at a lower, long term rate and it would be fine. If you aren't on the ladder you'll be paying the same or higher in rent, so the monthly cost will exist regardless.

IMO the best option is gov to bridge the gap for people moving out, and it's the deposits which are the killer, because they're based on needing a percentage of house value as the deposit. 10% of 250k is 25k, which is huge, but tacked on as a few extra years is negligible. Could do something similar to help to buy.

House prices in our area have decreased a lot, and houses on the market aren’t selling, and yet they want to build new houses in the area. Ludicrous!

They needed to go down 25 years ago. Even better, they needed not to quadruple in less than 3 years around the year 2000 mark while wages did not move at all.

I don’t think they will keep going up hugely now, for one simple reason: the baby boomers are now outnumbered. They can’t keep finding buyers among the impoverished later generations. But we could do with a nice gentle fall back to a normal wage/ price ratio: we can’t afford a huge collapse either.

Tbh, I don’t think the price of anything is going down anytime soon, at least not on paper. I can hear banks money printing machines whirring up. Get ready for inflation on everything…

Well yes of course. Where did I say that people don’t want to buy them?

We stand to inherit big amounts in the future but it will be going straight to our kids who’ll need it far more than we will.