To buy now or hold off... Help!

[optimisticpessimist01]

DH and I currently rent and are fed up of it. We were hoping to buy a house in the next year. That was until I heard on the radio that house prices are the highest they've ever been

House prices are in bubbles, they rise and fall in cycles over years and years, I had no idea just how high the bubble currently was!

Now this is where the predicament comes in: Do DH carry on with our plan to buy in the next year, and risk the bubble bursting and losing value on the house, or do we wait a bit longer and see if the average house price starts to decline?

House prices are always volatile, and the volatility varies from region to region. But the prices have always gone up over a long period of time.

If you can afford it now and you want to buy, do it when you're ready and don't worry too much about whether prices might go down in the next couple of years. They could just as easily go up too.

It depends a lot on how long you plan to live there/own the house for. 2 or 3 years - higher risk. 10+ years - very minimal risk of selling the house for less than you paid. (I'm a landlord)

And I say that as someone who bought a family home just before the 2007/8 financial crash, and have only just sold it as I'd have made a huge loss (we rented it out for the past couple of years)

You can never know. You have to do what's right for your own circumstances. Buying is least risky if - as others have said - you do not expect to need to sell in the next 5 years or so.
If you're renting , you know you'll be losing money every month. Sure, you don't pay for maintenance of the property but you don't benefit from any rising value and you don't have the security that you'd have with a bought property.

Depends where you are looking, parts of Scotland are flying and still rising, same with Wales while parts of the Southeast and London have reduced slightly.

As others have said prices generally always go up in the long term.. personally I have seen prices in south London fall about 10% over the last 3 years or so... cant see them falling much more than that, but also cant see them flying up again any time soon unless the government get involved with another stupid scheme
If you can buy for pre help to buy prices then you wont lose money... so 2012 or early 2013 prices
My area went up about 40% or 100k during 2014... also due to the stamp duty change
No one can ever time buying 100% perfectly and as long as it's a 5 year plus house I dont think buying can be a bad idea

Actually now I think of it, we bought our flat in 2014 and sold in 2018 with all the fears about Brexit etc., still sold for 20% more than we bought it.

Every month you pay rent, that's a payment that could have gone on your mortgage.

Look at it another way let's say a house is worth 350k and rents for 1500pcm

You get a 320k mortgage and use a 10% deposit... 5 year fix costs 1400pcm

So after 5 years with no increases in rent you are already 6k better off

But you have also paid money off the principle mortgage sum to the tune of 50k

So you would be 56k better off

If anyone knew for sure what the property market was going to do, we could all be millionaires.
People will always need to buy and sell houses. I was in exactly the same dilemma as you until I decided to bite the bullet recently. Make the most of your chain-free position, in a lot of areas it seems to be a buyers market. If you find a good property (which will appeal to various people), you should be able to sell in future hopefully without making a loss. A friend who works in the city told me it’s possibly a bad short-term investment (2-3 years) but good if you are looking at staying 10+ years.