Interesting article: " A home should be something we live in, not something we speculate on"

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here

good article.

don't think British peoples' attitudes will change, however.

a 12% fall in value is pretty minimal, as pointed out.

Interesting. I've often thought it was strange that everyone is happy for their cars to be worth less when they come to sell them, but expects their houses to be worth more.

good article. Always found the uk house market quite mad.

it is madness, isn't it, franca?

never seen the like, tbh.

12% is just the start expat.

i'll believe it when i see it, noddy.

doesn't seem like anyone's dropped prices all that much.

doesn't make any difference to us at any rate.

i'm just an interested onlooker.

i'll believe it when i see it, noddy.

doesn't seem like anyone's dropped prices all that much.

doesn't make any difference to us at any rate.

i'm just an interested onlooker.

Agree with the article. My home is just that, somewhere to live, not an investment. I am always amazed at friends who only live somewhere for a year or two, do it up and then move on an 'up'.

moving is such a colossal pain in the arse.

hate it.

it's a part of life if you're a private renter, though.

keeps the clutter down.

That does seem to be true expat. I know one family who rent and they are amazingly good at shedding the junk and moving on.

DH just took another bag down to the textile recycling bin on the way back to work today.

he delivered 3 boxes to Oxfam yesterday.

we keep the bare minimum.

when you have to pay to keep moving it round and it has to hauled on your own back you think long nad hard about what stays and what goes.

a home is something I would like to actually know I have in three week's time

Even a room would be good.

I guess the advantage though is that we only keep the bare minimum also and don't hoard too much stuff.

I was so pleased that at last someone in the mainstream press is being allowed to question the housing 'market'.

What I find so sad about the greed over house prices over the last 10 years is that the equity increases that people feel are such a good thing are not free money created from nowhere. To me it seems more like a pyramid scheme where you hope the next person after you will be daft enough to sell all their future earnings down the river to own a modest residence.

The net result is that future generations of families who will have to pay bigger proportions of their take home pay on houses.

What a waste of our national wealth, to pour it all literally into bricks and mortar. We are just paying more for the same thing, or actually something worse. The average new flat is smaller than the average council house provided to people in previous generations.

Paying more for the same houses doesn't add any value to life. Houses don't warrant an increase in value for any other reason than their scarcity when people want to buy them.

However, house price fortunes have seemingly become the main driver for politicians. If the government make the 70% of people who are homeowners feel good by allowing prices to spiral, they get voted in. If it all goes wrong, they get voted out. We seem to think we deserve huge amounts of unearned income just by virtue of being able to buy the shelter over our heads.

It seems positively Orwellian to me.....

I do like this so I'll post it again

high house prices transfer money from the young to the old and the poor to the rich

a pretty sorry state of affairs!

Great post Cloudhopper.

The way the media and politicians, even those who were supposedly left leaning, have glorified this misery over the past few years has turned me cynical. It is Orwelian. As the younger and poorer sections of society were made worse and worse off, the people who matter slapped themselves on the back and gloated about their unearned wealth.