House prices..

Sagalout said:
Eh? There is no housing shortage - just look at all the new builds that have stopped because theres no one wanting to buy them!

Rental prices are also falling at the moment due to the market being flooded by all the people who have had to give up selling their houses!

It would be a very brave person to dip their toes into BTL at the moment
Click to expand...

I'm currently looking for a place to rent down Cambridge, if I get my new job.

The rent price is almost as same as zone 2 in London! Should I want to live on my own without sharing a house with bunch of strangers, a 1 bed room flat/house at the outskirt of Cambridge is £600! And some of them don't even include bills.

My salary with tax taken out is just £1100, if I did rent a place for my own, more than half of my pay is gone :eek: Till this day I'm still looking for that reduced rental price to come.

My girlfriend use to live in the dead centre of London with her own studio flat, its really posh and decent and it costs £900 before credit crunch was offically announced.

I was expecting something like £400 a month down Cambridge or something but I guess it's impossible as it's the price you pay if you share houses with like 5 other people and bathroom. There are £250-£350 rooms, but it's like 100 years old house + furnature. :rolleyes:
 
DB_SamX said:
www.zoopla.co.uk

Postcode > recently sold

However, in mine, all recently sold are dated as today, so I am not sure how reliable it is. I really like that site though. There is also a link on the right to "home values".
Click to expand...

Thanks for that - will come in useful.

Unfortunately hardly anything has sold in the last 6 months or so , so its still difficult to get an idea of what properties are actually going for !
 
bum said:
There are £250-£350 rooms, but it's like 100 years old house + furnature. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Nothing wrong with 100 year old houses.

If buying, I would choose the 100 year old house over the new build, any day. The build quality is a lot more heavier and thicker on the old houses compared to what you get today.

If you are strong enough, you should be able to punch a whole through the plasterboard walls that they use today. This wont be the case with the 100 year old houses. ;)

Is there any reason why you want to go and live in Cambridge? I presume that is where work is? I have some suggestions but I would need to know where you will be working.
 
Has anyone done the HomeBuy Direct scheme and how have you found it?
Companies seem to be pushing these, due to them not selling houses. I assume you could get very good deals on new houses (getting them kitted out).
 
Here's April's report from Halifax:
http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/HousePriceIndexApril2009.pdf

Showing another 1.7% fall in April. According to Halifax the average price is now £44,896 or 22.5% lower than the peak in August 2007.

In absolute terms this takes us back to April 2004, wiping off five years of gains but remember this -22.5% is nominal. Very roughly 5 years of 2% inflation devalues the pound by almost 10%, so in real terms we're now back down to quarter 4 2003.
 
Funny how the BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8035363.stm contradicts Rightmove, who say that most FTBs think the market has bottomed out and now is the time to buy as prices are expected to rise :)

Do these firms with vested interests never learn? They are still trying to talk the market up and all it's doing is breeding even more contempt for them. I know a few people who are trying to avoid using the mainstream Estate Agents now - there are online services you can use for example.

I hate Estate Agents, last time I was in the market, they gave me a major headache and loads of stress, I am convinced they invented a fictional buyer to try to make me bid higher as well.
 
Yes, but this fall is artificially stimulated - you can't borrow and there are no cash first time buyers across 90% of the country. The whole set up is almost as amusing as if all beer manufacturers across the county stopped production 6 months ago and media focused on statistic showing effect rather than cause with headline of "alcohol consumption is falling for sixth month in a row".
 
v0n said:
Yes, but this fall is artificially stimulated - you can't borrow and there are no cash first time buyers across 90% of the country. The whole set up is almost as amusing as if all beer manufacturers across the county stopped production 6 months ago and media focused on statistic showing effect rather than cause with headline of "alcohol consumption is falling for sixth month in a row".
Click to expand...

To be fair, I think that the levels of crazy lending we saw won't return for a long, long time. The whole thing was unsustainable and why people think constantly escalating house prices are a good thing is beyond me! The primary intention of building houses should be to provide homes, not investments :p
 
v0n said:
Yes, but this fall is artificially stimulated - you can't borrow and there are no cash first time buyers across 90% of the country. The whole set up is almost as amusing as if all beer manufacturers across the county stopped production 6 months ago and media focused on statistic showing effect rather than cause with headline of "alcohol consumption is falling for sixth month in a row".
Click to expand...

You could say the opposite as well, the frankly idiotic house price inflation we saw for several years upto 2007 was due artificially stimulated, namely banks providing >100% LTV Mortgages on upto 10x income, which was, and forever will be, unsustainable...
 
100% LTV mortgages aren't neccessarily unsustainable. I had over 100% mortgage at some point one and there was nothing unsustainable about it. Even at insanely high levels of lending there is nothing unsustainable about 100% LTV and high multipliers. Let's say you want to borrow close to half a million, 100% LTV, on a back of 99,000 p.a. salary. You pay your full replayent £2300 out of £5.5k salary and still have over 3 grand a month to enjoy indian take away in your new river view condo. Nothing unsustainable or subprime about that, even less so if your partner brings another pile of cash home.

You'll probably find that most, of relatively small percentage of defaults we actually saw in the last year were not "subprime" sector but syndicates and "investors" with interest only mortgages because it was cheaper for them to let the bank reposses than be stuck with 10 flats bought from developer over the odds as long term investment. In fact as far as 100% LTV, 5x salary sector goes - we never had true subprime in UK. 100% LTV is not subprime, subprime is a lady selling door to door Avon for living with 25% APR mortgage for a glorified plywood trailer backed by an income figure drawn out of thin air. We never had that. This is all knee jerking to a wrong dance routine.

It's easy to say that escalating house prices had no precedence, but we have to remember this is self regulating market. In a country where rental is typically higher than mortgage on the same house and people in london spend over 50% of their salary on basic rent alone artificially blocking market by not lending when rates are low is borderline criminal. People will start handing over keys to properties not because they can't afford mortgages, but because paying back 250,000k mortgage on property now worth 150,000k and plummeting by the day just won't make long term sense. And let's see state of financial sector after they self induce property market crash on themselves.
 
Last edited:
sunama said:
Nothing wrong with 100 year old houses.

If buying, I would choose the 100 year old house over the new build, any day. The build quality is a lot more heavier and thicker on the old houses compared to what you get today.
Click to expand...

Are walls ever an issue in either type of property anyway? Rather than roofs, electrics, damp, piping...
 
Jonnycoupe said:
Are walls ever an issue in either type of property anyway? Rather than roofs, electrics, damp, piping...
Click to expand...

Well new builds have walls you could push through with 3 fingers, and transmit noise through them a huge amount. Plus you can't mount a plasma on them :D

But then as you have pointed out, older houses can have serious issues that might cost a monumental amount to put right.
 
-Ad- said:
Well new builds have walls you could push through with 3 fingers, and transmit noise through them a huge amount. Plus you can't mount a plasma on them :D

But then as you have pointed out, older houses can have serious issues that might cost a monumental amount to put right.
Click to expand...

All houses have glass windows you can break aswell...
 
Jonnycoupe said:
All houses have glass windows you can break aswell...
Click to expand...

What he is trying to say is that modern houses our soulless cespits, they are getting better especially if you look back to the tat thrown up in th 80's but they still in general lack the craftsmanship and character of a victorian house.

Back on subject, the house price falls have definately levelled off a lot but we still seem to be seeing a steady decline. I'm not really fussed I love where I live and have a good % of equity should we need to sell.
 
Jonnycoupe said:
All houses have glass windows you can break aswell...
Click to expand...

WHAT, really ? ;)

I did once tell a double glazing salesman that I had no windows and never wanted any, as it would reduce the nice breeze. He was slightly lost for words :)

As alex has mentioned, new houses are horrible rooms of boredom. Cheap tat imo, and I love a house with character that needs doing up. Once it is done, it will look and feel like your own special home, not some identikit cardboard house.
 
a1ex2001 said:
What he is trying to say is that modern houses our soulless cespits, they are getting better especially if you look back to the tat thrown up in th 80's but they still in general lack the craftsmanship and character of a victorian house.

Back on subject, the house price falls have definately levelled off a lot but we still seem to be seeing a steady decline. I'm not really fussed I love where I live and have a good % of equity should we need to sell.
Click to expand...

Newbuilds aren't getting better, they are getting worse! Houses built in the 80's have thicker adjoining walls than present newbuilds (where you'll generally find a small amount of insulation and some plasterboard separating semi-detached properties).
 
I simply do not understand the hysteria surrounding house prices - it is irrational to the point of lunacy.

Perhaps someone can explain to me why, as a nation, we should be clamouring for a rise in house prices? Why are rising house prices a good thing? I do not get it.

No-one is positive about rising utility bills, rising fuel costs or shopping are they?
 
The Mad Rapper said:
I simply do not understand the hysteria surrounding house prices - it is irrational to the point of lunacy.

Perhaps someone can explain to me why, as a nation, we should be clamouring for a rise in house prices? Why are rising house prices a good thing? I do not get it.

No-one is positive about rising utility bills, rising fuel costs or shopping are they?
Click to expand...

Because people are greedy and think that, because of what they see on TV, they too can make tens of thousands of pounds by buying some IKEA furniture and selling their house.
 
Perhaps someone can explain to me why, as a nation, we should be clamouring for a rise in house prices? Why are rising house prices a good thing? I do not get it.
Click to expand...

Simply because many bought houses as an investment (Jimmy with a paper-round could be a property developer!), climbing the ladder and all that. They hope to reap a nice profit from their little 2-bed semi whilst house prices rise. Many saw property as a complete sure-fire way to make money - prices couldn't possibly go down! This country needs an attitude change but I don't see that happening. Where are the long-term leases on rented properties too? Why can't we have 2/3/4/5 year leases which are readily available?

Englishman and his castle - I just don't understand the obsession with owning your own home in this country.

Slightly off-topic:

Martin Lewis (MSE) summed things up quite well on GMTV the other morning if anyone saw - I won't try to paraphrase. GMTV had a 21 year old couple moaning that they couldn't get a house because they needed a 25% deposit and they were panicking because they only had about 10% for a place they wanted.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom