Why do house price keep rising

[numenor]

There is a lot if discussion about how expensive property is and it keeps rising but people can’t afford.

why then do prices not drop?

Not enough being built. The population is rising as fast, or maybe slightly faster, than the housing stock.

House prices did drop last month
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj401ll8j5zo

Basic economics. Demand for housing massively outstrips supply, as it has for decades. When that happens for any commodity, the price rises.

First, the demand side of the equation:
People are marrying & settling down later in life, so there are more single households than ever before.
The population has been increasing significantly due to 25 years of mass immigration. The political Left doesn’t want to talk about this, of course. They want to blame developers, NIMBYs etc.

Second, the supply side of the equation:
Britain is not building anything like enough houses, and hasn’t been for decades. This is due to strict planning rules, developers hoarding land, NIMBYs pressurising elected politicians etc etc. The political Right doesn’t want to talk about this, of course. They want to blame immigrants.

But where do people find the money to buy them?

It’s basically just the same people buying and selling them with hardly any new entrants into the market!

The value of money goes down, what a pound buys you today will not buy you in ten years. That’s part of it. Not all/

how do people afford them, most it’s earnings, some it’s Inheritance, how do you think they afford them?

Nonsense, there is 300-400 thousand first time buyers each year.

Via inheritance mostly!

Houses are assets. In a low growth economy houses will sell. They also sell in an economy with low interest rates. And in countries that literally print money, like we do. That's the main driver of demand. We've actually got plenty of houses in the UK. We've got quite a lot of empty houses, and a fair few holiday properties too. Sure, a lot of houses are old and poor quality. But, that doesn't matter - when there's investment driven demand, even a mouldy, pokey Victorian single brick two up two down will fetch £750k.

Because despite the narrative that no one can afford a house (and it is genuinely harder than in the past), there are still plenty of buyers, plenty of demand, and a general shortage of housing stock.

Odd question............people earn enough money to save a decent deposit and get a mortgage.

Or inherit enough to put down a deposit.

Or take early retirement at 50 and use the pension lump sum as a big deposit and get a small mortgage for the balance.

I'm sure there's other ways as well. 🙄

Are you just making stuff up and posting it lol.

In London, especially in Westminster and the City, a lot of purchasers get their money from oil, arms dealing and embezzlement. No physical shortage of houses there - blatantly, as many of them are permanently empty.

🙄

Are they still rising? I thought they had dropped or stagnated & thats before accounting for inflation.

Affordability matters which is why London has seen falling prices/lower growth.

Have a read of Follow the Money by Paul Johnson. A lot of this is clearly set out in that book.
Moreover, a quick google suggests that back in even 2023, around half of first time buyers received financial help. You can read about that here: https://ifs.org.uk/news/around-half-first-time-buyers-their-20s-receive-financial-help-buy-their-home-large

so no, unfortunately I am not making things up. HTH

It’s harder to afford to buy a house these days (and really challenging if you are single) but its fairly easy to see how people find the money - by way of example my daughter, a newly qualified teacher had been planning on buying with her boyfriend when he completed his teacher training. They would have been able to get a joint mortgage of around £245,00 and they were on their way to saving a decent deposit. That would have got them a nice 3 bedroom house in Devon. There are lots of couples with joint salaries of around £70,000. In most areas (not London) this will get you on the housing ladder.

They aren't rising in many places.

They are falling slightly in some, but it's more typical for the market prices to just stall and flat line now because they've reached the highest multipliers will reasonaby accommodation compared to wages.

Because people obviously can afford it. Inheritance and bank of mum and dad would be my guess. A very high proportion of older people own property, so that money is being passed down to someone…

Who are all these single people who can afford to buy homes?

it not individual people in general, it’s a few giant companies who buy to rent

Back ‘even’ in 2023? I think it goes back a lot further than that. When house prices first quadrupled in just a few years back in 2000- 2005 while wages did not move, the only people I knew who were buying all had help from mummy and daddy, and screw those of us who didn’t have that and just had to work for nothing.

What's with the wonky face? The London property market is globally recognised as an important centre for money laundering. That pushes prices up. Difficult to argue that it's due to scarcity in eg the City, a place where one in three dwellings are empty. If you spend decades, as the Corporation has, approving planning permission for multiple cathedrals to bent money, your primary problem is the bent money, not some mythical undersupply.

Me, and DP, both own our own houses. Outside the SE it’s pretty common. I know loads of single people who bought on their own.