House price crash

[FabulousSophie]

I've been having a horrible experience on a website forum called HousePriceCrash.com.
I happen to believe house prices will fall significantly, which is why I went there to find out more, but many of its members behave in such a paranoid and hostile way towards anyone who dares utter any dissent towards their very particular and obsessional group beliefs. They repeatedly accuse other members of being undercover operatives for the property industry - they seem to have a grandiose idea that they are so dangerous to the property industry that the industry wants to damage them by sending undercover operatives to 'troll' their forum. They almost seem like a weird religious cult that does not tolerate heresy amongst its members, or else they will be publicly degraded and excommunicated from their church.
It seems populated almost exclusively by men, I think. One of its members seems to have become obsessed with me in a nasty way, and even though I have never responded to any of his repeated public comments to me and about me, he won't stop pestering me. He gives me the creeps. I know it is only cyberspace but I still find him a bit scary. Does anyone else have any experience of this forum?

They are of a certain mindset, that’s for sure.

Best avoided.

Yes, I've got fairly long experience of that forum.

There's a hard core of nutter/obsessives who get furious with anyone who dares to disagree with them. By their contorted reasoning, anyone with different ideas must by definition be a troll.

Some are pretty blatant misogynists, too - they love to hate mumsnet!

Ignore them - don't respond or rise to any bait. Best plan is just to put them on ignore.
Believe it or not, there are some nice, normal, reasonable people on HPC too.

I found that website in 2011 just after we had bought and I was desperate to sell (wanting to move home to Aus).

They are absolute nutters and trawl MN for any threads they can link to 🙄

It's probably the biggest echo chamber on the internet. A crash will come, as will HPI, then another crash, then another HPI. It's the way it's always been. Most on there missed the 2010 dip which they're still bitter about.

Sites like Ourproperty (land registry) and Petrolprices just provide data and will send you monthly email updates tailored to your geographical area. Quite useful and certainly no forums full of bilious misogynists.

It's like any single topic focus website in so far as it will come across as a bit tin foil hat/obsessive. Unfortunately they have enough racist/sexist users & toothless mods that sometimes It's like you've stumbled onto an alt right site! Slight incel vibes too! (Lots of posters rant about not being able to afford to buy & link that to their lack of a partner/family).

It's a shame because some of the information on there is good and it's important to have some anti house prices inflation voices. I find MN terrible for being so pro HPI & so unbelieving that prices can & do fall.

HPC users are morons. They complain about the greedy property obsessed "sheeple" but are so off putting they seriously damage the impact & reach they could have.

They’ve been boring on for at least 10 years. Clearly they’re not quite as great at predicting the future of the property market as they’d have you believe seeing as none of the outcomes of the widely held beliefs have come to pass during that time

They're mad. I started reading it around 2015/2016 when we were looking to buy our first house and I was terrified there would be a crash. (We ended up buying right in the middle of Brexit - gah.) Judging by old threads they have been predicting a huge, sudden crash for 10+ years, all the while prices rise in much of the country. They're bitter because they didn't buy when they could afford to, and now are stuck renting. And I agree with pp, there's an element of incel - families push up prices because both parents work, they're single so can't afford a home etc.

Just ignore them. No-one knows what will happen to the housing market, it's all a massive gamble and often varies hugely from one area of the country to another.

Oh yeah, they've been predicting a house price crash for at least ten years. I remember a number of people like that on MSE. I think the market value of my house has gone up about 75% in cash terms since then!

They’ll be right about a crash just like a stopped clock is right twice a day. It’s a site that attracts bitter, jealous, misogynistic losers who have missed out on the single best investment opportunity of their lives and will be stuck renting in their old age. They’ve missed the boat, and they can’t seem to grasp that a major crash (which can and may happen, it’s a bloody cycle after all!) would come with widespread economic collapse. Not a 50% crash with lovely mortgage rates, ample employment and a booming economy. They’ve been waiting for this crash for a decade whilst furiously hating those who’ve acquired major equity in that decade, who likely won’t be affected in a crash anyway. Every time we have a dip, they think it will fall even further and then miss the boat again

They’re probably apoplectic with rage at this thread you’ve started

There might well be a crash. (In fact there absolutely will be, eventually.) When there is, it will also become very difficult to get a mortgage with a small deposit - just like in 2007. No-one will move unless they have to, because they'll be in negative equity and will think and hope that prices will rise again.

It is rather nasty to hope for a crash, because it inevitably means some people will lose their homes. We bought in 2016 - if prices go down and interest rates go up hugely we'll be screwed when our fixed rate ends, because we simply won't have saved up enough equity yet. We were as sensible as possible and bought something well within our (current) budget with scope for improvement, that we can stay in for 20+ years if necessary, but it is always a gamble.

Everyone wants more affordable houses. Even the much-maligned baby boomers want them, for their children and grand-children! However, the reality is that this is a small island, even with Brexit the population is growing, new houses are not being built and when they are they're often not what is needed (we need social housing and small, affordable starter homes rather than five bed 'executive' houses). We also currently have a government with a huge amount invested in keeping the housing market afloat. No-one knows what will happen to house prices - especially not a bunch of bitter men on an internet forum.

And we currently have a government with a huge amount invested in keeping the house builders afloat.

Yes there will be a crash.

Yes there will be winners and losers

It’s the cycle of the property market

Unless we have a real harsh Brexit experience I can just see prices stagnating for a few years or a mini crash 10% or so.

Long as you buy something you’re comfortable with financially. It will all work out in the end.

What these people don’t seem to understand is inflation. Unless society goes Mad Max on us everything will go up in price.

They seem to have some crazy expectation that their wages will raise. But the price of houses will smash through the floor and Freddos will be 10p again.....

And if we do go Mad Max / Venezuela the least of our worries will be how much your house may or may not be worth.

Yes there will be crash. At some point, who knows when.

House price crashers have been waiting since around 2005?, they missed out on the credit crunch years thinking the market would drop further and when it didn’t they became even more and bitter and twisted.

As pp said they’ll be right in the way a stopped clock is twice a day, but bloody hell they’ve missed out in the meantime.

Take no notice of them.

They do make me laugh. There's a long running thread for Kingston upon Thames where back in 2009 they were saying "No way would I buy that flat for £250k! £100k maybe if you begged me, mate. The crash is coming soon!". Fast forward to 2018 and said flats go for around £500k+ ...

I've never dared post as I'm one of those awful people that bought in 2009. I've no idea why the Kingston one is so popular?

I have visited that site and there is definitely a nasty and mysogonistic tone running through it. A while back they were blaming women entering the workforce for the rise in house prices

Having lived through the crash in Ireland in the last decade I really would be careful what you wish for. Some people seem to think a crash means every mansion in town will be theirs, but the reality is that banks don’t lend so it’s harder to get a mortgage, and many people don’t sell because they wait it out. Not to mention the poor people stuck in negative equity who can’t sell at all. For many years the housing market just barely moved at all. House prices in Dublin are rising again which is obviously tough for some people looking to buy, but I really think it’s the lesser of two evils!

Jeez I just had a look on there...."women in the work place are subsidised by men, feminism has a lot to answer for". Nice!

That tells you a lot about the age group - no man under 40 would find women in the workplace something to comment on - it's just normal.

They're people who've seen their peers make huge amounts of money on the housing market, mainly by virtue of when they were born. They've missed out and are bitter.

Some of them have been on there for 10 years plus, saying that anyone who buys a house is a moron and deserves to end up broke and repossessed.

Baby boomers are all vilified by the hard-core nutters as greedy, selfish parasites, who don't give a toss about the priced-out younger generation and spend all their money on flash cars and cruises.
But at the same time, boomers who aren't bothered about flash cars or cruises and instead use their cash to help their children buy homes, are also devils incarnate who deserve to die horribly for helping to prop up prices.
The poor old BBs can't win.

My god, I used to read threads on that website years ago, probably 2006/7/8 and they were all frothing at the mouth about the big crash. Even then they were predicting the impending apocalypse.

It’s a waste of headspace reading that website, no doubt still the same core people saying the same things!

That forum has turned into Chat site for those who who’ll never be able to buy their own home to wish hardship on those that do and nothing else.

Most on there now accept that they are too old to get a 25yr Mortgage, have no money for a deposit and won’t be able to afford to buy a house even if prices drop by half or if interest rates went back to 5%.

They have seen their peers overtake them in life and have bought a house, they have seen that the baby boomer have paid off their mortgages and the millennials set to inherit their homes ( or buy with a gifted deposit) while they are being left behind. None of them now see a house as a home anymore but more of a poor form of investment ( they are all into investing in Bitcoin and gold now while they pay rent on their flat) which they want to avoid as they have left it too late in life to get a mortgage.

Long time HPCer here, though I hardly post anymore. The main problem is they’re so right and so wrong at the same time. House price inflation as we’ve experienced it is mad, and bad for the country. Early on, HPC was an oasis for people who wanted to escape from mainstream HPI cheerleading, and did exquisite takedowns of the constant ramping in the media. And they made sense; it was unsustainable. The iron laws of economics, etc.

Turns out it was sustainable, at least in the short term (which just gets longer and longer). They underestimated the lengths the government and Bank of England would go to keep it all propped up.

At its height it was must reading for anybody who wanted a sensible alternative view. But as the insanity went on and on, people started dropping away, and now it’s a shadow of its former self.

I think some of the bitterness is because people who saw the madness for what it was, and held back out of prudence, have more or less been screwed, while many who joined in, often quite recklessly (not to mention wanting to be bailed out by historically low interest rates, thus further punishing savers), have benefited enormously.

Mark I can understand them being upset at what has been happening with house prices, I, too, wish the insane HPI that is rapidly pricing the majority out of owning a home, would stop. However, I think the hardcore obsessed HPCers are extremely paranoid, seeing the world, including women, as their enemy. Unfortunately, it is that same hardcore of oddballs who rule the forum. They band together to drive out balanced, sensible and tolerant conversation, and only allow the paranoia and extremism, of which they approve.