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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

to think thank god the London property bubble is looking like bursting

290 replies

lexiepix · 26/02/2015 20:20

www.property-time.co.uk/news/Featured-News-227/articles/Latest-Index-Shows-London-Housing-Bubble-Has-Burst-111171.aspx

Its been long overdue and the lr figures for the last few months show that pretty much all of inner London is falling. I know some will have pain from this, but its been waiting to happen for ages and the longer it inflates the worse the pop will be.

For what it's worth I don't live in London, but I think when they do pop the whole country will be better off. When I was working in London most of my older workmates were on about the UK average pay (22-30), but living in property worth between 500-800k, and calling a 300k one bed flat "cheap" Confused

OP posts:
Skiptonlass · 01/03/2015 14:12

Gypsygirl, you're absolutely correct. I have no problem at all with good landlords - for example I once rented a house from a lady who had been stationed abroad for two years. She rented the place perfect, at a fair rent, and I kept it lovely, kept the garden in good shape, etc.

However... When I was younger (I was a student for years) I saw the bad side. Rogue landlords should face much, much stiffer penalties. One house I lived in was owned by a local politician. It was not fit for human habitation. Shame on her.

cruikshank · 01/03/2015 14:23

Skiptonlass, re rogue landlords, the problem is that the system we have now, where tenants can be given 2 months' notice for no reason at all, means that landlords can effectively do what the hell they like. Even if a tenant gets the LA on board and forces housing repairs (difficult to do but not impossible) then the landlord can and will evict them. Unless we restore security of tenure, then our private rental stock will remain in the poor condition it is at the moment, with 1 in 3 rental properties being substandard. And, incidentally, the bar for being a habitable property is set pretty fucking low - you don't need carpets, you don't need to provide white goods that work etc - it just needs to be in a basic state of repair. But 1/3rd of landlords are not, right now, managing even that. Which is a shameful situation.

cruikshank · 01/03/2015 14:40

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

gypsygirlfromlondon · 01/03/2015 14:40

I completely agree with you Cruickshank - that expands on my opinion very succinctly. Successive gvts have done nothing to deflate house prices or combat the housing benefit bill. I am Labour but how can I vote for a party that has woefully ignored our accute housing problem? I'm still voting though- God only knows for who ! I don't see a crash anytime either. I see all the Home Counties becoming like London as more move out and commute.

If I could move North I would tomorrow but there is no work there for my DH who is employed by an International company in a specialist job. Moving many more big businesses north would also help to bring down house prices but it's not happening. I doubt if will happen even with HS2. I wish it would; so many areas like the North East have great potential but are languishing in the shadows.

It's lunacy that one little corner of the country is charging house prices 10 times maybe more that of the other 80 percent. And the effect of London retires on house prices in Devon, Cornwall, Sussex etc. Don't get me started on that!

Mumzy · 01/03/2015 15:11

I wonder why they don't increase the stamp duty on property sold to foreign buyers. They benefit from the UK a strong property laws and I doubt an extra 1-2% on the property price would put them off as most want the security of knowing their money is safe. We could raise a shed load of money much better than the mess that is the mansion tax

bettertomorrow · 01/03/2015 15:16

Do you understand the ripple effect this will have on the rest of the economy?

noddyholder · 01/03/2015 15:24

A significant fall in house prices would affect most of us but that doesn't mean its not necessary. People have enjoyed low monthly repayments and the mother of all equity withdrawal and it can't go on. I know 2 people who have been paying virtually nothing for their mortgages over the last few years. One in particular who is 900 a month better off but she hasn't paid any of it into the capital and is dreading rates rising even though she has paid 'normal' rates previously. We are addicted to debt and stuff and its a disease

Mumzy · 01/03/2015 16:08

Would'nt put them off

frumpet · 01/03/2015 17:01

Schnitzel did the de-regulation occur in and around 2001 ? and how were mortgages regualted before that ?

FamiliesShareGerms · 01/03/2015 20:28

By "can't afford to sell" I mean "the mortgage can't be ported to another property" or "the sold price would be much less than the amount owed on the mortgage" or similar

SchnitzelVonKrumm · 01/03/2015 21:20

Frumpet Like most things that are shit about modern Britain, it was started by Thatcher and continued under Blair.
Financial deregulation was one of Maggie's Big Ideas - because she thought free markets would always make things better - so she allowed banks to start mortgage lending and lifted restrictions that governed how much could be lent (the old rule of thumb was 2-1/2 times your income). There followed the Lawson housing boom and the 1990s bust.
By the time Blair arrived, globalisation had brought more lenders into the market and the vogue worldwide was for 'light touch' regulation of financial institutions (propounded by US central bank chairman Alan Greenspan, another market fundamentalist) - basically the idea that banks would know themselves and stop if they were taking on too much risk. Only they didn't, and lent more and more on ever-looser terms, using financial engineering to magic up more money, until the chickens came home to roost in 2008.

BumpAndGrind · 02/03/2015 02:20

I don't think the prices would be so much of an issue if banks were more realistic in terms of what people can take on.

The bank won't lend me enough money to buy a property because I don't earn enough for the repayments.

Yet rent costs a third more than a mortgage would (for me). So how can they claim I can't afford it when I'm already paying plus more.

It's not as if I'm old so will keel over before the end of the term or am a high risk.

IMO renting should be the cheaper option. I'm sure it used to be?...

BumpAndGrind · 02/03/2015 02:31

Thats came out all backwards... rent needs to come down, not banks lending more.

I just think it's wrong that I can't buy a 120k property because I 'can't afford the repayments' but pay a lot more than they would cost in rent for the same house.

retrorobot · 02/03/2015 03:05

Property prices in London may steady but will generally not fall. However, there is a often a big gap between asking prices and sale prices. Asking prices may certainly become more realistic. Also, there will be falls in certain locations and market segments. There is a huge amount of "luxury" flats coming on the market in centralish London over the next three or four years. I've seen how a glut of new build flats at Canary Wharf/Greenwich has dampened prices there and am sure that it will happen elsewhere.

One point that I note, however, is that people who talk about the jumps in London property prices are not comparing like-with-like. The house that sold last year for four times what it sold for in 1999 may have had a loft conversion and rear extension, increasing its habitable space by 20%, it may have been rewired, redecorated, had a new kitchen, bathrooms, etc. Even without any extension/loft conversion, there is a big gap (as much as 20%) in price between a house that has been fully refurbed in the past five years and one that hasn't been refurbed in 25 years. (Although some refurbs can be less than ideal - I viewed one house where each room was painted a different neon colour.)

I do get pretty sick of listening to people whinging on this thread about how they can't afford to buy somewhere in London. The problem with a lot of local people is that the 1950s - 1970s gave them the mentality that they would be "given" a property by the council at some ridiculously sub-market level rent (subsidised by everyone else). My wife and I own a six bedroom Victorian terraced house in zone 3. We came to London, separately, ten years ago and lived in house shares in ex-council flats where the living room was another bedroom until we saved deposits to buy small flats of our own in less desirable areas of zone 3/zone 4 which we paid off as quickly as we could. We sold our flats and pooled our money to buy this house. We didn't drink, we didn't smoke, we didn't have satellite TV, we didn't go to any festivals, we made our own packed lunches and took them to work, we worked second jobs at weekends. After we met and got married we didn't have children until we had bought our house and got the mortgage on it (because if we had, then we shouldn't have been able to get the mortgage).

A lot of the problem is the mentality of some of the "locals", like gypsygirl on this thread sneering about Lewisham. House prices are about supply and demand. She might consider Lewisham overcrowded and dirty but more people want to live there and not in whatever corner of Kent she has moved to. In particular, immigrants have high aspirations and are worried about the racism and culture of low aspirations they encounter when they go towards the edges of London - teenage girls whose aspiration in life is to become a hairdresser or go to beauty "college". The whole grooming scandal is an illustration of the culture of teenage sexual promiscuity that pervades working class "culture" in this country.

littlecharlie · 02/03/2015 04:27

This reply has been deleted

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

intothenevernever · 02/03/2015 06:39

OK, twat is one thing but 'tards? Going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant to call us 'spoilt little turds'. Which I have no problem with. Grin

GibberingFlapdoodle · 02/03/2015 08:33

Cruikshank, I agree that we need a crash but I have to take issue with this : "We can certainly build more. Only something like 2% of the UK is built on. Only something like 6% is classified as urban. We have plenty of space."

I don't know how much we actually have available to build on, but it certainly is nothing like 94% if that's what you're thinking. The figure comes from a 2012 Uk ecosystem assessment. If you look briefly over that report you'll see that the total land use giving that 'only 2% built on' figure includes literally the whole country: including the parts that are more up and down than side-to-side, northern Scotland, Snowdonia, the Pennines (which we can't even throw a decent train line across). It also includes open waterways -rivers, lakes, canals and the like. I imagine it includes floodplains, the wetlands we're now beginning to realise were all drained in error causing us environmental problems, and erosional zones (i.e. much of the coastline).

That's before you factor in how much land we need to feed ourselves on. Britain is not currently self-sufficient in food. How much that matters is a moot point but personally I'd prefer as high a proportion as possible. Also the green spaces left near urban areas have been shown to be necessary for improved mental health.

It would be nice to get some better hard figures on exactly how much land is realistically available to build on. Not to mention how the people in these new cities are going to survive economically, but that's another story... Given that Britain is highly densely populated and England even more so -England alone ranked right behind Netherlands and above India last time I checked - let's not fool ourselves that it's going to be easy. There isn't an inch of this island that is not being used for something.

JillyR2015 · 02/03/2015 08:59

The building is needed within the M25 for a start. We have masses of land with nothing built on where on one wants to build and houses only costing £30k in some areas of the NE which no one will buy. The move to decentralise (Manchester to manage its own NHS budget, BBC moved to Salford etc) might help. Leeds and Manchester have jobs and they also have relatively cheap housing in some areas not too far away from those towns.

In London though I do agree with the post above saying many of us who now own and our ancestors really did slum it for years and years before after a long period of putting off what we wanted now to get a reasonable house at the end of the day only eventually got a reasonable house. You have to start grotty and awful in most cases or did 30, 50 and 70 years ago anyway. I live in London zone 5. You get spoilt people who aren't prepared to commute on the tube from here and therefore say it is impossible to buy a house where they want to buy it further in. What they really mean is that they feel so entitled they are not prepared to live where the rest of us live. More fool them. They may well be renting forever.

littlecharlie · 02/03/2015 09:22

There's no point building more houses, when older owners are 'investing' in BTL all the time. Once prices begin falling it's going to panic out a lot of sellers to market, including those who in recent times have been releasing equity from their homes (bubble value) to buy investment property at bubble value.

Hopefully many of the investors will lose their investment properties and their main homes and go bankrupt into a hard South East / London HPC. They deserve nothing but maximum pain for the misery they've put on younger renters.

THE TIMES
Property

Britain becomes a nation of renters as buy-to-let prices out new buyers

Philip Aldrick Economics Editor
Published January 1 2015

Departmental figures show that the vast majority of new housing in the UK since the turn of the millennium has been bought by landlords. Between 2000 and 2012, the private rented sector has accounted for some 2.5 million of the extra homes. Only 400,000 have been bought by occupiers.

www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/property/article4311161.ece?shareToken=15b2410d946d0a35bf4bb875d204d1d6

Suzukimum2be · 02/03/2015 09:41

Some people on here are abhorrent, wishing misery on others. Many have invested their hard earned in becoming landlords to provide quality housing and an essential service that people need. These people need to be protected so that renters can have somewhere to live.

WhistlingPot · 02/03/2015 09:45

Some great questions here. Smile

How many MPs and Lords are private landlords and do those with personal interests in the private rental sector have to declare them when voting on housing strategy issues?

WhistlingPot · 02/03/2015 09:46

Oooh, wrong thread Blush

Viviennemary · 02/03/2015 10:13

Sorry I don't agree with people wishing misery on others (as in BTL Landlords) The people I feel sorry for are the people on good salaries priced entirely out of the market and expected to pay massive rents on tiny run down properties. BTL is an investment. And like all investments carries a risk. The people looking for a home are the ones who need our sympathy. IMHO.

littlecharlie · 02/03/2015 10:18

Suzu. There is no sympathy for people-farmers into the HPC. You've made investments. You're justifying it as doing a public-fkin-service now?

Don't try and kid anyone you're being altruistic. Landlords do it for the money, income and hope of capital gain. The market doesn't owe you a living or property riches, and younger people struggling against ever higher prices as in recent years. Houses going up more per year than they've been earning in income.

When prices fall, their main home loses value as does their investment property. Leverage is the nasty bitch when values go down and you own two or more. The full horrors on people-farmers is going to be beautiful to watch into a house price crash.

JillyR2015 · 02/03/2015 10:37

Most landlords have their own home plus one property. Many are very reputable. Many are mumsnetters who have had to move for work and rent where they moved to and let out their previous house. there is nothing morally wrong or evil about them. Some like my daughter who rented her only property for nearly 2 years because she could not afford to live in it are good landlords. Also not all the tenants want to buy. Her tenants -young mobile doctors in London move regularly at that early stage of career and need property in London to rent for a year at a time.

There are very bad tenants and very bad landlords out there but most are not like that.

We had two flats we let out and we sold them in the 90s property crash at less than we paid for them. I would not really say I was a people farmer but I was certainly trying to feed my children as a full time working mother. Just because you buy a property to let out does not mean you are farming people. The net return for most landlords before tax is about 3 - 5%. My daughter made nothing on the rent after the costs so not much farming going on there except for an analogy with crops sown on stony ground perhaps.....

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