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?

[FabulousSophie]

I think there are some normal nice people there, but the obsessive oddballs and misogynists, who are unable to tolerate any dissent or questioning of their religion, rule the roost with an iron fist (supported by the site's owners). They are highly unlikeable and make the whole website a very nasty and unpleasant place. They are supremely paranoid about people joining their site, believing anyone outside their warped clique to be 'trolls' wanting to contaminate the purity of their religion. The obsessives hold their views with such unwavering certainty, that they even see people, like me, who do not have the same absolute certainty as their enemy.

[MarkCarnage]

My impression is that a lot of the HPcers do not realistically want to buy a home, unless it is handed to them at 1970s prices

I think what they want is for prices to return to a reasonable multiple of salaries that most people actually earn.

[BuildingThings]

@FabSophie I really do sympathise with your experience of that forum and this is an interesting thread you have started, perhaps you should stay on this side of the internet and contribute to this forum going forward. I think the atmosphere and the support of MN is amazing and contrary to what has been said on HPC there are a lot of people here who do not support the HPI and there have been a lot of very interesting threads on this over the past few months.

@Mark That’s interesting. It almost reminds me of incels – once the sensible people who started the forum were gone it quickly accelerated out of control. What happened to those early posters? Did they end up buying? Also, I do not believe that all HPC users are ‘nutters’, but like I said before, scrolling through and skim reading 85% of the posts, looking for the informative and interesting POVs can be very tedious and boring.

[BuildingThings]

sorry - perhaps 'sensible' was the wrong word to use when talking about the early incel forum. apologies.

[FabulousSophie]

I, too, would like to see more sensible income multiples, but in the event of a correction or crash, the government may well do whatever it takes to maintain house prices. And as someone has said on this thread, with the advent more joint incomes, the historic income multiples may now be meaningless - this has helped me understand the cause of some of the HPCers' misogyny against women working.

[BuildingThings]

This is what i was referring to,

www.elle.com/culture/news/a34512/woman-who-started-incel-movement/

once the moderator was gone - there was no turning back.

[BuildingThings]

Out of interest, where do you live @FabSophie?

[FabulousSophie]

@BuildingThings I live in Cambridgeshire, where prices are very high. I am a cash buyer but I baulk at spending a fortune on a hovel. I look at houses in the £500k range and I see grotty lower-end houses that can only be afforded by wealthy people. If the wealthy can now only afford lower-end houses, something has gone seriously wrong. If the wealthy can now only afford working class houses, what hope do the working classes have?

[BuildingThings]

@FabulousSophie Good question. In my master's thesis I was studying the London council estates that were being intentionally neglected by the council to be sold off to developers under the pretence that it was beyond repair. I looked at how far the people who got CPO's were pushed out of the capital - some had to move as far as Wales.

We also have planning laws that do not allow to 'over develop' sites, so we can never meet the demand.

[LondonMischief]

Home ownerships rates in the 1970s, when income multiples were smaller, were much lower than even now.

Also the average earner does not mean they can afford to buy an average priced house. They generally buy lower priced homes, and low earners usually rent their home ( previously from the very wealthy but more so from big companies and regular individual these days).

Expectations have definately changed over the decades with more people expecting luxuaries, finer things and their own home, compared to the 1970s.

[FabulousSophie]

Essentially, I think I am torn. On the one hand, I think prices will fall, and I would benefit if they do fall. But on the other hand, I find the high priests on HPC, who are trying to spread that gospel are such unlikeable people that I hope they are wrong. I don't think they will make friends or help their cause by being so ghastly. If the government had to choose between upsetting that hardcore of nasty HPCers, or upsetting normal home owners, I think it would be a fairly easy choice.

[jemihap]

There are some nutters on HPC that give the site a bad reputation, but no different to the few nutters on here that result in mumsnet receiving
pretty much universal derision and ridicule.

[TurquoiseDress]

I used to look on that website a few years ago, never signed up or posted and just found it all rather extreme & full of frothing at the mouth style ranting.

Oh yes, and I do recall MN posters getting a slagging every now and then during some of the posts

[SparklyPyjamas]

I love going across to HPC because its comedy gold. You have the likes of Spyguy, CountofNowhere, Arpeggio, TheWig and many others who are all millionaires because they've invested all the money they would have spent on a mortgage on shrewd investments.
Most of them are going to retire abroad and buy somewhere cheap outright thus pushing prices up for locals and doing exactly what they are constantly whinging about. Every landlord is scum and every homeowner is an idiot who has something bad coming to them very soon (or certainly in the next 100 years). The reality is most of the posters on HPC are Northern blokes who have not done very well at life and feel hard done by. They are too stupid to realise that if they bought when they originally joined HPC many of them would have been 50% or more up by now with a combination of HPI and paying of their mortgage.
Most of the threads created on Mumsnet are started by these lowlifes as in their tiny minds they believe by spreading fear throughout forums like this and MoneySavingExpert they will create a snowball of misery so they can get 10k of their 1 bed in Middlesborough.

Possibly the greatest thread on the HPC website. Someone coming back nearly 10 years later after they "gave in" and bought in 2009 and made 100k in the process.

Pay particular attention to this comment from none other than the Count himself...

On 02/12/2009 at 11:56, TheCountOfNowhere said:

"Well, you havent timed that too well.

It's another mini-peak.

Caused by

a) people think they are getting a bargain ( but have missed the low point )

B) people thinking house prices are going to shoot up ( well they aint )

c) people terrified they will miss the boat ( some boats aint worth getting on, e.g. the titanic )

Good luck though. A house should be a home not an investment."

www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?/topic/131688-bought/&

[Kenny33]

There are some horrors on there - aggressive, bitter, misogynist (such as Jurassic Bland who likes to pretend he went to Cambridge whilst bullying new members and changing his name every now and again as he thinks doing this will stop his repetitive behaviour from being noticed). Some good, sensible people too, posting interesting economic updates and, as someone else said, it’s a good place to go to find the various indices as soon as they are published.

I don’t know what will happen to house prices. I think anyone buying now, or at anytime, should try and protect themselves as much as they can. Buy in area with good schools, fix as lower interest rate as you can find for as long as possible, buy something that can be extended in case your family grows during a recession etc.

[TurquoiseDress]

@SparklyPyjamas

You've inspired me to take a visit to HPC, not been on there for years!
Sounds like lots of comedy over there

[Oliversmumsarmy]

Some of the older posts are hilarious.

Over the years I have known a few people who would fit right in on HPC

One was a surveyor who said all the people who had bought on a small development were going to go bankrupt as they had overpaid. The houses (4bed detached) were only worth £25,000

[FabulousSophie]

Yes. It was Jurassic Bland who became obsessed with me in a really aggressive way. He is an extremely creepy character, and the HPC forum is clearly his entire life and his reason for living. He is completely obsessed with it! He was probably the one who got me banned because I refused to respond to his fastidious unwanted attention and bullying. I got the impression he may even be the Moderator himself, or is in bed with the Moderator. As for TheCountofNowhere, he is beyond unhinged and has lost the plot entirely - obnoxious!

[Kenny33]

Jurassic Bland bullies and baits people, then reports their responses to the mods. I used to post on there a bit a few years ago, but ended up buying so now just read it now and again. Other people have said that they thought he was one of the mods. I can see the HPC point - house prices are ridiculous in comparison to incomes - but I doubt the government are going to do anything to bring them down. The current government seem to be aiming for a flatlining of prices. If we got a hard left government in then they might aim for a crash, not sure how as house prices are high across the developed world.

[FabulousSophie]

I posted a recent MoneyWeek article that said that house prices would now probably plateau or drift down slightly from here. I think it was this, which made me a target for Jurassic Bland, as he stated bullying me intensely soon after that. His whole self esteem seems to rely on a need to be the loudest voice, drowning out other viewpoints by writing endless aggressive, boring posts in a very patronizing tone that he thinks will garner him respect from a small clique of admirers. And he is desperate to be proven right for the sake of being proven right, as though his damaged ego depends on achieving that satisfaction.

Of course he will eventually be proven right, in the same way that he would eventually be proven right if he devoted his life to proving that eventually there will be another recession, or eventually it will be winter again, or eventually everyone will die - it takes absolutely no skill or knowledge to get those predictions right any old idiot could make them and be proven right. But he seems to think that if he writes an encyclopaedia on the subject, he will be lauded and loved by the world as the greatest living genius, when the inevitable eventually happens.

What the hardcore nasty HPCers, like Jurassic Bland fail to realise that by plastering their own obnoxiousness over the internet, they are only making it that little bit easier for the government to side against them, and to side with ordinary homeowners when rigging the market.

[Kenny33]

I think that’s probably what will happen (but what do I know, I’m not an economist), unless there is some kind of big shock to the economy (hard Brexit?). However, a big shock to the economy would have other repercussions such as high unemployment and people losing their homes and I think the government will do anything in their power to stop a repeat of the early 90s recession.

I suspect he is single, in his 40s at least and has missed the boat on buying a house. I can’t see that he has a particularly taxing (well paid) job or family (or even many friends) as he wouldn’t be able to spend so much time on HPC if he did. I’d write him off and forget about him. I suppose the risk of posting on the internet is that you will inevitably bump into key board warriors like Jurassic Bland.

[Whatthefoxgoingon]

No government is going to support a tiny bunch of inconsequential lunatics. The market will do whatever the market will do. The patrons of hpc don’t matter one iota. This Jurassic bland character sounds like a complete dickhead. I hope he isn’t ruining some poor woman’s life....

[Kenny33]

Fox, I get the distinct impression that he is single. Pop over there and read some of his posts and you will probably agree.

[MarkCarnage]

Minority views are always suspect. HPC also enjoys the very mixed blessing of an unpopular prediction in their name.

I get that it’s uncomfortable if not enraging to hear people talking almost cavalierly about the possible destruction of your equity, even when that equity is Monopoly money that was only earned by virtue of buying at the right time because you were born at the right time. The fact remains the housing market is moribund. Why is that? They’re too expensive.

The mumsnet view is typified for me in a post in the Sellers roll call! thread: “Can't believe that we're looking to be spending another Christmas here in this fucking shoebox.” (I’m assuming her agent isn’t taking that marketing angle.) The solution is to enslave some other poor schmuck with debt.

We’re a country of people trying to sell insanely priced shoeboxes to each other. The HPCer says this is fucking nuts. Everyone else says pipe down and get with the programme, you nutter. The HPCer was shouting it from the rooftops early enough that if the government had taken heed (as if anybody in government reads HPC - they clearly pay attention to mumsnet though), there wouldn’t be a need for a crash.

[Oliversmumsarmy]

I don't get how equity is destroyed. I bought a home. I have now nearly paid for that home. If the prices go through the roof or become worthless it doesn't mean anything. It is still my home