Housepricecrash.co.uk - what a bunch miserable buggers. Can I get some normal folks opinions please?

[DaddyCool]

.... and not some 45 old wally still living with mother and bitter because he spent all his money on model trains instead of a down-payment back in 1998?

Not a good cross section on there at all.

Is it going to crash do you think? Please give me your opinions. As far as I can see it's a 50/50 split on the nation's opinion but I would like to see how similar people to myself (parents with small children) think.

You've posted before about how excited you are to see people losing their homes. Not excited about a crash, but specifically about people losing their homes because of a crash.

It's also been explained to you sooo so many times now that a crash will NOT mean everyone can suddenly afford a house. I mean, just think about it for even two seconds. If all the ordinary working people can suddenly afford a house, you will have dozens of people interested in every house that goes on sale (because now they can all afford it). That will lead to bidding wars. The house will finally sell at a price that the majority of the bidders couldn't afford. Ugh, I don't know why I bother, none of this will ever sink in for you.

It just makes me laugh at the relsneering at ordinary people just living their lives, minding their own business, harming noone and yet apparently they are the morons - whilst they are sat in their beautiful cosy homes.

Care to explain why this hasn't been the case in every previous crash?

@HotChoxs

<headdesk>

Well, that is very much my point. It hasn't happened in any of the previous crashes. It won't happen, ever, because you can't have boom conditions in a crash scenario.

Crashes happen when supply outstrips demand (i.e. not enough buyers).

'Not enough buyers' happens when hardly anybody can afford a house.

Booms happen when lots of people can suddenly afford a house.

Do you follow me? A crash doesn't mean 'Woohoo, cheap houses for EVERYONE!!!!!!' It means 'Oh shit, nobody can afford a house.'

The best way for ordinary working people to be able to afford nice homes is for ordinary working people to earn good wages. The HPC crowd would be more effective if they expended their efforts supporting Mick Lynch on the picket lines ... but they don't.

The people wanting a crash want something different - they want ordinary working people to remain poor, and also for the slightly wealthier ones (the ones who bought their council houses, or took the plunge and bought 10, 15, 20 years ago) to lose what they have acquired. They are motivated by punishment and retribution.

The reason they completely and utterly disregard the 'if everyone had better wages, everyone could afford houses at current prices' perspective is that it highlights two very painful truths they just cannot accept. First, that they aren't particularly special or wise, they are just like all the other ordinary working people (specifically - they are poor), and the second is that they failed to recognise and take opportunities to buy when they last occurred. They really did miss the boat - but by failing to acknowledge that their own timidity played a major part in this, they will make the same mistake again this time round.

Hence the 15 year thread ...

👏🏻

Can't argue with any of that, spot on.

No it generally means I can afford a house but I'm not going to buy in case it drops another 10%

It generally means second home owners and investors still clear and increases supply

At the tail end of every previous house crash there's been a long period in which people can afford houses and there's no big rush to buy one because there's an oversupply

So to answer your question people won't be bidding property up when it becomes affordable because there are too many houses for sale to do that

@JesusInTheCabbageVan

I can tell you weren't around buying property in the 90s. It was easily affordable and people were still steering clear. Those of use bucked the trend were also the ones offloading over the past couple of years.

@HotChoxs I'm not sure how you can know everyone's reasons for holding off following a crash, though.

In reality it's likely to be due to a variety of reasons. Including job losses/insecurity (particularly in the 90s...), high interest rates/difficulty getting a mortgage, a fear that prices will fall further etc.

Also worth remembering that people in the 90s didn't have crystal balls, or the internet. They had no way of knowing that a massive boom was coming. Whereas anybody now can look up a graph of UK house prices over time, and clearly see that cycle of boom and bust. People are more savvy now, and know all about 'buying the dip'.

(TLDR: every single crash is different. Best not to assume that people will behave in the same way now as they did 30 years ago.)

Can you share the quote?

The rest of your post doesn`t makes much sense, not in the adult world anyway, if working people have a limit on how much they can borrow set by interest rates why would the house price go up above the affordability limit? And most importantly - WHERE DO THE DOZENS OF PEOPLE CHASING EVERY HOUSE LIVE AT THE MOMENT?

Can you share the quote?

Inexplicably, I have failed to commit your many pearls of wisdom to memory. And much as I love being right, I have discovered that I don't love it quite enough to trawl through your hundreds of posts on threads about house prices.

The rest of your post doesn`t makes much sense, not in the adult world anyway, if working people have a limit on how much they can borrow set by interest rates why would the house price go up above the affordability limit?

Eh? House prices go up. Then something goes wrong. Recession, inflation, global financial crisis, lack of available mortgages, or any combination of those. Suddenly people can no longer afford houses. That's what causes a crash. Isn't that literally what you lot on HPC have been banging on about for decades?

And most importantly - WHERE DO THE DOZENS OF PEOPLE CHASING EVERY HOUSE LIVE AT THE MOMENT?

Gosh, aren't you shouty. Is that because you think you've won the thread? Perhaps a little reminder for those at the back that I was speaking hypothetically. Here's what I said:

"Well, that is very much my point. It hasn't happened in any of the previous crashes. It won't happen, ever, because you can't have boom conditions in a crash scenario."

But if you're wondering where those people were living during the recent boom (when that is exactly what happened - dozens of people chasing every house) then I can help you with that. Some lived in rented. Some already owned houses which they wanted to sell. Some owned more than one house! Some lived with parents, relatives or friends. Some lived overseas, I guess. I think that covers it?

@JesusInTheCabbageVan

That's a bit of a silly point really. When you live through an era you get a good idea of what people are doing and why they're doing it.

Also we did have the internet in the late 90s when houses were cheap. But regardless it wasn't the dark ages, people read newspapers, watched TV and conversed.

Moreover people don't have a crystal ball now yet people still go on about how house prices will bounce etc.

I don't really know why you're lecturing from theory to someone who's lived the experience.

@JesusInTheCabbageVan
People are more savvy now, and know all about 'buying the dip'.

Or they're more prone to herd behaviour and are going to get their fingers burned

I think for many it will be more than fingers getting burned.

@HotChoxs if you only want to hear opinions from people your own age, you could try gransnet?

My point is that our environment is very different today. People are vastly more connected than they were in the 90s, I'm sure you can't argue with that. Also, I assume (maybe you remember differently) that people in the 90s weren't anything like as obsessed with the housing market and home ownership as we are now. I'd be amazed if those factors have no impact at all on people's behaviour.

I do agree with that.

Well we were connected in a different way, a deeper connection. There's a broader connection now but more shallow.

But while housing has been going up GBP has been going down. Housing here has not gone up much at all if you're American.

Sustained house prices just mean people are getting poorer on the whole. As you can see this Winter people are struggling to heat, health services are on the brink, people are striking. We're on the verge of power cuts. It's a winter of discontent. If anything is going to break the property obsession it's the realisation that people aren't better off for it.

I’m not sure people are more savvy than in the 80s, but they are definitely more complacent about debt.

I worded that badly - it would have been better to put 'savvy' in quotes. I definitely don't think people are any better at judging risk and timing the markets now! But people think they are, because it's so easy now to get all that information.

That's why so many people have lost money on crypro etc, and my personal feeling is that the same illusion of expertise (combined with the increased pressure to own a home) will influence the housing market in the years to come. There would need to be a really, REALLY big shift for people in the UK to lose interest in home ownership.

Oh gosh, you can tell which posters on this thread have come over from HPC!

I know this is a zombie thread but it's an interesting read. I used to visit the HPC forum a lot back between 2007 - 2011 when I was in my twenties. In the early days there were a fair amount of tin-foil hatters, but also a number of relatively normal posters discussing the economic crisis and predicting a significant house price crash. A lot of posters were hoping for a crash in order to buy their own home.

Merryn Somerset Webb from MoneyWeek was their idol at the time.

When in early 2009 various friends started mentioning that they were buying their first home, I felt slightly smug that I was waiting (in reality, I couldn't afford to buy anyway) because I 'knew' from the oracles at HPC that a bigger crash was just around the corner.

By mid-2010, it was clear that the big crash was not materialising. The 2007/8 crash had been and gone. By the end of 2010 my husband and I were in a position to buy. Did we follow the advice of the HPC forum experts or did we bite the bullet and buy a starter 'shoebox' flat, so derided by the posters on HPC? Interestingly, by this point, there had been a noticeable reduction in the fairly normal HPC posters, leaving behind the True Believers.

We bought. And in later years moved to a bigger home (making a significant gain on the starter flat). We're now in a place which is big enough to comfortably raise a family.

If I'd listened to the HPCers, my husband and I would have been priced out of the starter flat within a couple of years. Fifteen years later we would still be waiting for prices to drop while spending an ever-increasing share of our income on rent.

To be clear, I don't think that the runaway inflation in house prices has been a good thing at all. I know that friends of mine, who are just six or seven years younger than me, have struggled far more than I have. At age 32 they live in rented shoeboxes rather than mortgaged ones. As for us, the hike in interest rates and accompanying mortgage increase will make life less comfortable (although not unaffordable). I don't know what the answer is, but I'm pretty confident the answer doesn't lie with the increasingly-nihilistic posters on HPC.

Recently, I had a look at the posts on HPC. The PP who said it is full of bitter old misogynists with slight Incel inclinations is correct. One bloke was talking about how he had been clever enough not to have bought a property or found a partner or had children. He lives the dream, typing away on HPC (probably from his parents' basement), salivating over a house price crash that will see thousands of people lose their homes.

Many of the posters there are no longer interested in a crash because it will enable them and others to buy a home. They want a crash to punish everyone who tried to make the best of the situation and took out a large mortgage. They take great pleasure in sneering at posters on Mumsnet (well, the posters here tend to be women and mothers, innit) and nothing would delight them more than to see homeowners suffering.

All I can say is I'm just glad I stopped paying attention to them in 2010.

Similar to @EdgeOfACoin, I used to read HPC in the late 2000s. I was priced out and couldn't afford to buy until prices dropped. I bought when they dropped, thinking that it would drop more. I was sick of renting a tiny flat to save up for a deposit and knew we'd be able to stay in the house for at least ten years so any reductions would not matter as long as we could pay the mortgage.

I'm glad I didn't wait either. I only wanted something to live, not an investment. I don't think it will drop to pre-2008 levels, and if it did, you would have been paying rent for at least 15 years by then if you waited since the late 2000s. You could have practically paid a mortgage off by then, or at least paid off the majority of it, if you'd used the savings from ultra low interest rates for overpayments over the last decade. Rents have gone up significantly since the late 2000s, so saving a deposit would be harder.

Houses are overpriced, that doesn't mean waiting 15 years to buy was a good idea. Waiting a couple of years might be, if you get the right point in the cycle, which is more luck than judgement. That point is very hard to call. Prices will probably drop now as mortgage affordability tightens. I wouldn't want to call the bottom of the market, it's impossible to predict everything that could happen to affect it. If you can afford it and are not overstretching yourselves, buying isn't neccessarily a mistake over the longer term.

I wouldn't put much weight on Moneyweek. Looked at it recently and one of reporters thought that Kwarteng had good economic ideas!

I wouldn't put much weight on Moneyweek. Looked at it recently and one of reporters thought that Kwarteng had good economic ideas

Merryn Somerset Webb later admitted she had underestimated the role of foreign investment in propping up the housing market.

At the time, however, in the mid-late noughties she was fully expecting a crash.

I haven't looked at MoneyWeek in a long time.