To wonder wtf is happening with the London property market?!

[MeAndMine21]

Unbelievable. It's never been this bad.

Will it just keep going up?

m.youtube.com/?reload=7&rdm=1shdg9a9#/watch?v=4ECi6WJpbzE

An interesting watch.

Not everyone in London can buy then can they, but thats always been the case! Two Londoners on £26,000 each can find property to buy , they just can't buy in the areas that they want to. All these people who want victorian terraces in zone 2, with great local amenties but at 1980s prices are round the twist.

A lot of London is social housing - overall 24% of properties are social housing, but in 34 wards, it is over 50%.
Most of zone 1 has over 50% social housing [[https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Housing%20in%20London%202014%20-%20Final_1.pdf see] page 11.

clicky link

The only people I know who live in zone 1 are in social housing or get housing benefit.

Page 56 of Carols link ...
Across London as a whole only 3.6% of household spaces had no usual residents, but this proportion ranged from 0.5% in the Valley ward of Waltham Forest to 28.6% in the Knightsbridge and Belgravia. The fifteen wards with the highest proportions of household spaces without usual residents were all in the City of London (counted here as one ward), Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.

Lots of rich gits keeping houses under used

Page 68 proves my point up thread about Battersea Power station
50% of nEw Build in Central London is sold to non UK residents

Battersea Power station is a good example, so is the fact about speculation on London property. In West Hampstead they are putting up new builds that all sold off plan on the first day they were on the market. Just over 6 months later some of them are back on the market, still unfinished, but have gone up nearly£100k, and they're selling!

Battersea and other new build flats are not where a lot of us want to live, though. A tiny flat is ok when you're single and 25 but when you want kids/pets/a garden it isn't suitable. The properties being built now are not what people want. The real supply & demand issue is in outer London where an average terrace gets 30 people viewing on an open day and goes to best and final offers.

Goneanddone
Battersea and other new build flats are not where a lot of us want to live, though. A tiny flat is ok when you're single
HA HA : have you looked at the spec of those things - they are the size of a 3 bed house
www.batterseapowerstation.co.uk/#!/go/view/app/global-launch?view=prospect-place

My point is that 2000 homes are being built in Central London
so technically meeting demand
but 50% of them are being bought by overseas buyers to keep empty for the capital gain

but those flats were built instead of homes ...

I do think people are making too much of this still.

There are affordable properties for young professionals in London, just not where they used to be.

Colindale has lots of 2 beds available quite reasonably, is on a tube line, close to Brent Cross, Golders Green, has the RAF museum etc etc.

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION%5E70344&minBedrooms=2&maxBedrooms=2&displayPropertyType=flats&oldDisplayPropertyType=flats&sortType=1&numberOfPropertiesPerPage=10

People turn their noses up though, well if you can't afford to be picky.....

longtimelurker
When I grew up in the then scummy area of SW London : where derelict and squatted buildings were a fact of life
I was within a 15 minute walk of Harrods
my mum could cycle to work anywhere in central London

now people have to budget thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours per year to commute to where we used to be able to afford to live.

My old road is mostly empty - the owners live abroad and keep the properties empty to avoid dealing with HMRC

Talkin... but there is going to be nothing done about that is there, or even if it was there would be loopholes that the mega rich would be able to exploit.

When we first moved to Kilburn there were IRA collections in the local pubs, there was a bustling night life that had a seedy undercurrent, there were squatted flats in many of the streets. Thats why it was cheap.

The place still has its nightlife but its a lot tamer, the streets have much more expensive cars on them, and the house prices have rocketed.

It is much nicer though!

Longtime
No. There is something absolutely solid that could be done.
Extend Council tax up to band Z and make it treble for every property without at least one person with a UK NI number living there.
Property cannot move. Ownership can, but bricks and mortar cannot.

Council Tax on a Battersea Power station £2m flat = £900 per year
Equivalent property tax on the same in New York = $25,000 per year

its all about cost of capital
rip out the tax free gains and the money will move away
and the prices will return to accommodation rather than speculation

DP and I live in a relatively small 2 bedroom (no garden) flat with DS and 2 cats. Perfectly doable. We don't need a house or a garden just because we have DC and pets. We made the choice to stay in London as we both felt living in London in a flat was preferable to living in a commuter town in a house. DP's job is something that only really exists in London, so we don't have the option of going further away.

I think to the owners of these kind of houses the £25,000 tax per year wouldnt be off putting at all. The reason they put money into London property is not for quick buck returns, but mostly because they are much less likely to lose value over time, its seen as a safer investment, far more immune to fluctuations in global business activity than stocks or bonds.

longtime
but the £25k per year, every year
will bring the cost of investment back into line with other asset classes

TBH the best thing would be for Gideon to unravel the cesspit of LLPs
which are unique to the UK
and are why London is the world centre for Money Laundering

transparency of beneficial ownership would make the hidden tax benefits be worth a LOT less

Some of those things are happening. There is ATED - the annual tax on any residential property over £500k owned by a trust or company - has had an effect on London property. The £50k a year non dom tax etc etc. It is not as if nothing is being done. Where I live zone 5 we have nothing like you have further into London - there are no empty properties and there are lots of people fighting over every property that comes on the market at the lower end.

This £435k house is similar to the one we bought 30 years ago www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52172941.html

People have to move to grotty areas always to buy in London. It ebbs and flows. People moved out of awful slums and tenements in the East end out to metroland in the 30s.

The top end of the London market over £1m is killed off almost by the higher - up to 12% stamp duty rates so people are moving further out. Better to buy 2 or 3 places with lower duty than one place with a stamp duty which would buy you a whole house. So the state has dampened the top of the market through those means.

Some people do buy in zone 1 who are not on housing benefit - like my daughter and her husband.

I don't think people who are cash buyers of houses over £1 million are going to be that bothered by £25 k tax sum.

If you can afford to buy a house and leave it empty your not paying the mortgage on it are you?

Lets say you bought this: www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52162532.html

25 K tax plus a service charge of say £50k a year, so overall costs are £75,000. So a ten year cost of £750,000. But at the end of ten years you will have an asset that is still worth £35,000,000.

Now if prices increase in line with inflation of say 3% across that decade, you have made a profit on your investment, and lets be honest the increase in prices is likely to be slightly above inflation.

No deterrent there at all.

longtime
but a sight more than the current £800 situation AND a chunk of money coming in to London to build replacement properties

it has to be in the WHY NOT category

It does indeed, but won't happen under this administration.

I don't think even building more would calm it down, there are so many looking to get on the housing ladder.

It really creates massive divides too, those who are wanting to get in hoping for a crash (which wouldn't actually help them at all). Those who are already on the ladder hoping that it doesn't crash and goes up in order to benefit them, or at least so that it doesn't leave them in penury.

Like I said previously even a big crash in prices would be temporary because of the knock on economic effects of it.

HousePriceCrash ain't gonna happen (but they have let me back onto the site again )
but YYY
Cameroon and Gideon are all into transparency until it goes anywhere near their funders
and then they want the FOI act shut down

Cameron and Gideon are masters of doublethink, I don't know how they get away with it.

because they are not
they do not think at all

Gideon has 11 SPADs (paid for by us) to do his thinking : they constantly disagree - it shows

dave delegates absolutely everything to anybody
and then heads off on hols again

Oh I'm pretty sure they do think. They are very clever, wily, and are getting what they want.