Should I move now or after Brexit?

[Nevermindhey]

My plan was to move next summer and start looking in the spring. Now with all the doomed forecasts about the housing market post-brexit I don’t know what to do.

In my area the housing market seems buoyant. There are four sold signs in the surrounding streets and nothing sticking so I think I would sell quickly.

I am struggling with lack of space where I am so I don’t want to get stuck here if house prices plummet and the market takes several years to stabilise.

What do you think?!

Your suggestion that prices are 100% certain to crash when we leave the EU is pure conjecture and fear mongering. It is Project Fear on steroids.

I never said this, though I think it is very likely, though not certain. Likely enough, however, to make it extremely silly to take a risk on.

What I have been talking about is the fact that the uncertainty about what Brexit will look like, and the lack of confidence that it will be end up good for the UK (especially given how inordinately inept the govt have been in its negotiation thus far), is having an effect now, and will continue to do so for the next few months. This has already started, but is yet to ripple out.

What remains to be seen is what happens after Brexit, but certainly enough people are sufficiently worried for there to be a significant slow down in property transactions.

With regard to your claim about 'conjecture', this is of course all we can do at present, given the bone-headed way Cameron breezed on with a Brexit vote without anybody having the faintest clue would it would entail (though enough people were happy to take a wild leap in the dark with the nation's finances and future - no doubt because most of them were clueless about how serious the ramifications could be, and had been brainwashed that anybody sounding the merest note of caution was 'scaremongering'.) Your own thoughts on the matter are also, of course, conjecture.

Using terms such as 'scaremongering' and 'Project Fear' to people who are genuinely concerned about the country's future, and actually have professional training and experience to be able to form an informed opinion, makes you sound like you have uncritically swallowed the rhetoric of the likes of the Daily Mail, and are just regurgitating it, without much thought.

You do realise that when great swathes of the population are mouthing sound bites dreamed up by political spin doctors - and believe them - that there has been a very successful PR campaign to divert people away from facts, and towards emotions, don't you?

@ShovingLeopard
Perhaps the two of you would feel at home joining housepricecrash.com, which I think shares your opinions.

It’s all very well quoting historical interest rates, but for obvious reasons we cannot go back to those days. We had a £15,000 mortgage for our first house in 1979 at 15% interest rate. We had an additional top up loan of £3000 to make the total loan £18,000. The house cost £20,000. DP earned £5000 pa and I earned £3,000 pa. As we had good jobs we were allowed 3x main salary plus 1 of the lower. We bought a 3 bed semi in the SE commuter belt but in a so so Town. A similar house is now £350,000.

Interest rates were high to combat inflation. The hot political potato of the day. It wasn’t particularly difficult to buy a house if there were two of you and most of our friends did as single people before we got round to it. We saved for our deposit but lots of friends were given the deposit for a wedding present. No one was in Private rented at all. That market hardly existed where we lived.

When the interest rates went down, we moved. Houses sold when money was plentiful again. However prices rose hugely so you were not much better off! We never had to borrow to our maximum again but possibly we should have done. I think unless you bought houses in the 70s and 80s, you cannot possibly realise what high interest rates felt like but it didn’t stop people buying. You just scaled back what you bought. Many single friends bought small 2 bed Victorian terraced houses in not so good areas for about £13,000.

Of course the availability of money affects the price of houses. That’s obvious. But so does supply of housing, the demand for housing and the general well-being and confidence of buyers. A high number of immigrants fuels housing demand for example.

Brexit certainly affects demand as people have moved out of the uk. Confidence is waining. People are unsure about their earnings and jobs. It affects prices as people consider staying put or pricing keenly to sell. Others are waiting.

One thing it will affect, if interest rates rise or loans are restricted, is completions of new houses. No buyers with money equals no new house completions. Just like 2009. That’s why the buyers will not be made to suffer high interest rates. The economy would totally stall. The BofE might do a gradual increase but it won’t stifle all growth. With the cost of Brexit, that would be suicude.

I've been a member of HousePriceCrash for years
it at least understands that interest rates do not drive house prices.

Housing supply is controlled by developers
Housing demand is controlled by macroeconomic factors.
Top end housing supply has nothing to do with interest rates as those properties are not mortgaged.
But the push and pull from the top end affects the middle of the market.
A Hard Brexit will clobber the top end

We have just had a card through the door saying demand is high for houses in our area, so obviously some people are still moving. There are three new build estates in the town, so I suspect people are looking at the (highly inflated) prices there and opting for established properties. It does suggest that the market is not dead everywhere.

Or it implies that the estate agents are utterly desperate

TA1kinpeace I did think of that, but they are selling for one of the developers so they still have that business. Things allegedly go quiet in August anyway. We put two properties on the market in August two years ago and were told that then.