To ask about experiences of selling property in London now?

[gardenangels]

Conflicting reports from estate agents. ..

Once the land registry prices are published for September sales, that will be when anyone can say with any certainty whether prices are coming down.

Kirin - renters are permanently at risk of losing their homes. They have no security at all. Whether a homeowner is in negative equity or not it makes no difference at all to their security. What matters is that they can pay the mortgage every month. Whereas a tenant can pay the rent successfully every month and still get turfed out, just because, or have their rent raised unilaterally by several hundred pounds a month, just because the landlord fancies it. Homeowners are in a far stronger position. Even in negative equity.

Flowers - I've been a renter since I was 18 and bought my first flat 3 months ago at the tender age of 38. I'm very very aware of how renting works.

Does it not occur to you that there will be an interest rate rise and that negative equity + increased interest rates means people might not be able to afford mortgage payments? If the property is valued at 30% less than you pay at the time of purchase your LTV shoots up and so your mortgage payments do too.

Sadly a crash will only help those with plenty of cash who don't need a mortgage. A crash will make getting a mortgage much harder. They will snap up the flats FTBs would have bought and more BTLs will be born. I know lots of people who are waiting for a crash to do exactly that.

Round here, reductions on pre-Brexit prices come on every day.

BUT prices rose by about 30% in the few months leading up to Brexit, and more importantly, to the cut off for BTL landlords stamp duty rates being raised, in April.

It's pretty unequivocable that the vast majority of those rushing to buy before April at inflated prices were landlords. As the market here fell off a cliff post April.

The number of properties languishing on the market since then continues to grow. Reductions continue to amass. BUT from an incredibly high starting point - in my area, as I said, prices have doubled (in some cases more than doubled) in 2 years. So it's a long way to go before prices are even back to the (already high) levels of 2 years ago. What I'm seeing is just the start.

I would rather see travel subsidised than people in negative equity. I think it's a lot more do-able, it's just that the government lacks the will to do it.

It is utterly naive and ridiculous to state that it "makes no difference to security" to know that your home is worth tens of thousands of pounds less than you owe for it. How would you sleep at night, knowing that if you lost your job, or became ill and unable to work, you would be unable to service the mortgage - and unable to sell the property to pay off the debt because you'd still owe a fortune if you sold? Would you be quite happy to sell it and suffocate in the remaining debt because it would mean someone else could buy your home at a cheaper price than you did?

Because that is what you are wishing on other people, when you hope for this lovely big crash. If you still think that's trolling, well, I despair!

kirinm - "Does it not occur to you that there will be an interest rate rise and that negative equity + increased interest rates means people might not be able to afford mortgage payments? If the property is valued at 30% less than you pay at the time of purchase your LTV shoots up and so your mortgage payments do too."

Yes, of course it does. It's obvious.

The real question is - did it not occur to you before you bought the property? Surely you realised there were risks involved in buying at a very high LTV? And that it's not the fault of people who haven't bought that the prices were as high as they were, or that you chose to make that (presumably calculated) risk?

Presumably you chose to buy despite the fact you knew the value of your property could rise as well as fall because you had decided that the benefits of owning outweighed the risks? And presumably your finances were stress-tested in case interest rates rose to ensure you could continue to meet the mortgage were that to be the case, before you were ever offered a mortgage?

So flowers, where exactly are you that prices increased by 30%?

Temporaryname - if you chose to take on a huge mortgage without worrying before you did that about how you would meet the mortgage, then that's your responsibility. It's not the responsibility of people who didn't buy.

Had I bought at high prices I would have done so following a calculated decision that the joy of owning my own home was worth the potential risk that house prices might fall.

It's not as though it's a secret that house prices can fall as well as rise. It's not like they've never done that before in recent history. It shouldn't even be possible now to get a mortgage without first having your finances stress-tested to ensure you can continue to meet the mortgage in the event of interest rises.

I have far more sympathy for tenants whose rent is raised by several hundred pounds by greedy landlords, out of the blue, just because they can, even though mortgage rates remain at record lows. How are those tenants supposed to plan for that? They can't.

Oh and we had a LTV of 20% so we weren't naive. We did take into account interest rate increases.

Why haven't you budgeted properly so you can afford to buy?

kirinm - look at pretty much the entire Home Counties. It applied across all of them.

There are plenty of examples on this thread alone of properties that have doubled in price in the last couple of years.

kirinm - you can't 'budget properly' when prices double in 2 years. Not on top of paying rent. Even if we had spent not a single penny of our after-tax income on living, price rises would still have dwarfed that.

For the avoidance of doubt my question regarding your apparent failure to budget was not a serious question given that I know exactly how expensive renting is and how hard it is to save but it is as fucking offensive a question as your suggestion people who have only recently bought are naive.

After paying thousands and thousands in rent for two decades, when my first ever opportunity to buy came up I bought. The amount of compromising I had to do to buy meant what I bought was nothing like what I was looking at when we first started looking. That you can sit there and get excited about people being at risk of losing their homes is weird.

Well, kirinm, if you had an equity cushion of 20% and you calculated the risk before you bought, why are you worried?

Do you now regret buying?

Why is that the fault of people who didn't buy? Do you think w have some sort of duty to help you pay your mortgage because you now regret your choice?

Right, and you chose not to take that same risk.

But you are expecting sympathy for not being a home owner, and you now want to remedy that at other people's expense. They're your morals. I happen to disagree with them.

If your landlord raises the rent, you can move. If you want to have another child or your job moves to the other side of London or the country, you can move. You're not stuck with it round your neck like someone with a mortgage would be. But I'm guessing you don't see that as a good thing - just as people who've bought their homes won't see a plunge in prices as a good thing!

The problem lies in the council houses being flogged off and the population rising far too quickly to match the stock. And in developments like the one in North West London a couple of years ago that was actively marketed off-plan in the Far East as not having any affordable housing element. Although even then the jury is out a bit, as building all those developments has kept a lot of people employed and paying taxes, the buyers have paid SDLT into the treasury coffers etc etc.

The best way to solve the problem long term, as I've said, is to encourage people who can to spread out more across the country - thereby boosting deprived areas too - and to make city centres more accessible from more remote places whilst decent new housing stock is built. A short term hope that prices drop just far enough for you to get on the ladder (at which point your views on nice property crashes would doubtless do a pretty prompt about-face!) is not a good way to solve it.

A PP has already pointed out that the people who will swoop in and buy the cheap houses are not the sort of people you have in mind as being benefited by a crash. S/he is absolutely right. My old boss bought about 25 flats in Manchester when the last price plunge happened, all for cash, all to be let out. The people who sold them had all paid top whack for them - and all ended up bankrupt or with huge debts to pay off.

I'm not "excited about people being at risk of losing their homes".

I've never suggested that I was and I have no idea where you get such offensive ideas from.

I'm excited at the thought of my being able to buy my own home coming a little nearer. But no-one needs to 'lose their home' for that to become a reality. The majority of homeowners own their homes outright. If they have to receive slightly less unearned profit on selling than they might have done a few months ago I daresay they'll cope.

Indeed, the chances I would buy a home from someone who bought in the last couple of years and therefore stands to lose some equity on the transaction is vanishingly small - firstly because their numbers are tiny (transaction volumes have been very low) and secondly, because, as has already been correctly pointed out, these are exactly the people who won't be able to afford to move and will be 'stuck'. As long as they continue to meet the mortgage payments, though, they will not be at risk of losing their homes.

Unlike tenants, who as I've already pointed out, are permanently at risk, even when they do meet their rent payments without fail.

"Oh good. Well, fingers crossed for a big price crash."

Looks pretty clear to me.

You're advocating a crash of 30%! And suggesting that is a good thing. A reduction of any percentage in value increases our mortgage payments and that doesn't even take into account interest rates. A combination of a drop in value and interest rate rises makes the affordable repayments close to being unaffordable.

I don't regret buying although I did initially because I had very little love for what we ended up buying. I've no doubt we will live where we are for a long time to come because I'm not anticipating price increases - and we bought knowing that. There has to be a ceiling price for a 1-bed flat and I think we paid it. I'm not encouraging price increases.

How can a "reduction of any percentage in value increase your mortgage payments" - surely if you were worried about interest rates rising so much, you bothered to fix your rates?

And I haven't advocated a price crash of 30% or any other specific figure - I've just said that that's how much prices rose in my area in the space of a few months. I daresay in lots of the country they are still below where they were in 2007 and clearly price falls of 30% there would be outrageous.

If you bought knowingly at the ceiling price and are happy with that then all well and good and I hope you'll be very happy in your home. I'd be perfectly happy if I was in your situation and had made the choices you made. In my area, recent prices made the same options unaffordable for me but I'm happy others were able to buy nevertheless.

The majority of homeowners own their homes outright.

Not to let facts get in the way of a good argument, but it's 7.4 million households as outright owners, vs 6.9 million mortgaged-owners, as of 2015 source. That's still rather a lot of people who can suffer rather badly if the market turns, interest rates rise, etc.

The current housing market benefits very few, in short. I don't think it's helpful, flowers, to paint some other posters on this thread as having an "I'm all right jack" attitude / not wanting prices to drop just because we've bought. People do what they can in a very difficult situation to have some semblance of security, whether they rent or own. There's risk in both, as kirin and others have pointed out.

No one can buy at the moment,
No one who owns a price can sustain a huge price drop (ie a crash in value)
So whats the answer...?
I can't answer the OP, i've always steered clear of London when buying properties even though I've bought (and sold) in other cities and lived in london.. I never wanted to buy. Because I know the bubble will burst eventually.

Ok I rephrase people can buy, but ordinary people and londoners are priced out and have been for years.

We are on a fixed rate but it's not fixed indefinitely. By the time we come to remortgage we'll be mid-Brexit and who knows what state the country's economy will be in by then.

When the almighty crash comes you'll also have to take the risk of buying with the uncertainty of how long that crash will last.