It's true - houses just aren't moving

dopester

mr.broderick wrote: »

In fact it is getting quite depressing logging on to mse these days. We have lost the characters, the main reason i hung around....Very sad..

You mean most of the HPI cheerleaders and the "no crash coming" crowd?

Yeah it is a bit strange how they've shut up as prices have begun crashing.

The UK sheeple have got a bigger shock coming to them about the "value" of their houses than Neo had in Matrix 1 when awaking from the Matrix to find everything he held true was in fact not the actual reality.

I'm so glad my liquidity isn't all trapped in UK property. I'm so, so glad.

mircea

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

With a decent deposit, good credit, and realistic multiple, you certainly can get a mortgage now. It's the 8-times-income and 100% mortgages whcih have gone.

Really? So how comes I have 90% LTV in my house, the mortgage value is 2 x multiple of combined income, we have good credit and yet we seem to struggle in getting a decent remortgage deal? Also how do you propose saving for a deposit? If we rent, with one child, we would be looking at paying around £700/month in rent. Our mortgage monthly payment (capital + interest) is £850. I doubt that the extra £150/month could get you a very large deposit! The house prices are a bit higher then they should be, but in my opinion the problem is the wages. In this country wages are too low! How is anybody meant to be saving is beyond my understanding.

neverdespairgirl

HammersFan wrote: »

By the same token many of those posters will have pensions, ISAs, Unit Trusts etc. that invest in all sorts of very dodgy businesses (oil, mining, gold, banks etc.) that cause all sorts of people, right across the world, all sorts of grief)). So I think having such a pop at large BTL'ers, and wishing doom on small-scale BTL'ers is a bit rich coming from them.

Speak for yourself . There are ethical investment funds, and SIPPs, and some of us (such as chez NDG) are careful about our funds.

neverdespairgirl

mewbie wrote: »

That's some research there NDG. Promise you wont ever do that to me. Although if you did there would only be a series of half baked ideas and some lemon jokes.

I am in an evidence-based profession, what can I say?

WTF?_2

mircea wrote: »

Really? So how comes I have 90% LTV in my house, the mortgage value is 2 x multiple of combined income, we have good credit and yet we seem to struggle in getting a decent remortgage deal? Also how do you propose saving for a deposit? If we rent, with one child, we would be looking at paying around £700/month in rent. Our mortgage monthly payment (capital + interest) is £850. I doubt that the extra £150/month could get you a very large deposit! The house prices are a bit higher then they should be, but in my opinion the problem is the wages. In this country wages are too low! How is anybody meant to be saving is beyond my understanding.

What do you define as a 'decent' remortgage deal?

If you expect giveaway interest rates as has been typical of the last few years, forget it. Risk is being repriced to reflect its true cost.

90% LTV, 2x joint salary is pretty much 'max available' credit by historical (ie non-bubble) standards. :rolleyes:

drbeat

dopester wrote: »

The UK sheeple have got a bigger shock coming to them about the "value" of their houses than Neo had in Matrix 1 when awaking from the Matrix to find everything he held true was in fact not the actual reality.

Yeah and don't forget the shock that Neo had in Matrix 2 when he learnt that there had been previous Matrixs that had failed! That can be likened to the sheeple now learning that there has been previous crashes.

as in both cases, "The Architect" will let it happen!

neverdespairgirl

mircea wrote: »

Really? So how comes I have 90% LTV in my house, the mortgage value is 2 x multiple of combined income, we have good credit and yet we seem to struggle in getting a decent remortgage deal? Also how do you propose saving for a deposit? If we rent, with one child, we would be looking at paying around £700/month in rent. Our mortgage monthly payment (capital + interest) is £850. I doubt that the extra £150/month could get you a very large deposit! The house prices are a bit higher then they should be, but in my opinion the problem is the wages. In this country wages are too low! How is anybody meant to be saving is beyond my understanding.

So you can get a mortgage. It's just you don't like the terms. That's very different indeed.

If you rent @ £700 a month, you would be saving more than the £150 a month difference, as you also save on running the place. I'd reckon more like £250 a month. That's £3k per year.

And you could also rent somwhere smaller, cut down on other outgoings, etc.

HammersFan

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

Speak for yourself . There are ethical investment funds, and SIPPs, and some of us (such as chez NDG) are careful about our funds.

I said many, not all.

dopester

mircea wrote: »

The house prices are a bit higher then they should be, but in my opinion the problem is the wages. In this country wages are too low! How is anybody meant to be saving is beyond my understanding.

Go cry to your union about it. Welcome to the global economy.

UK wages are going one way, and that is not upwards.

We've had an economy underpinned by people selling houses to each other at ever increasing prices, fuelled by a never ending flow of cheap easy money.. and the rest of the economy has undergone a massive shift.

You can't expect private firms to pay beyond their ability, and public increases are not possible if the tax revenue is huring in the private sector.

The economic change of recent decades has been from the primacy of manufacturers to that of communications, from machine power to electronic power, from factory to office, from mass production to small teams. As the scale of enterprise falls, so does the potential for sabotage and blackmail in the workplace.

Smaller-scale operations are much more difficult to organise by unions. Partly, this is because they tend to be smaller, more footloose targets. Many deal in services or products with negligible natural resource content. In principle, these businesses could be conducted almost anywhere. They are not trapped by a specific location like a mine or a port. If operations become uncomfortable they can move.

Such firms also have an added inducement to escape union demands for monopoly wages. Smaller firms tend to have more competitors. If you have dozens or even hundreds of competitors tempting your customers, you cannot afford to pay your employees more than their actual worth. If you alone tried to do so, your costs would be higher than your competitors and you would go broke.

The decay of union power as economies move into the Information Age is hardly a random development. It is a predicatable consequence of the declining scale of enterprise and therefore the increasing costs of redistributing income through disguised blackmail. Both the economic base and the class ideology of socialism are in rapid decline. The industrial worker, having had his summer of class power, must now give way to new interests and ideas, based on emerging rather than declining technology.

Because unions can no longer extract political blackmail from employers as readily as they used to, it is hardly surprising that the share of income claimed by essentially unskilled workers is falling while the percentage earned by the well-educated and the capitalists is rising.

Contrary to the animated assertions of union officials and their supporters, the decline of unions, and the resulting shift in the distribution of income, are not evidence of increasing "exploitation." In democratic countries at least, it was the workers who exploited the capitalists during the phase of technological development that was characterised by large scale output. The unique legal immunities that exempted unions from laws against intimidation and violence during strikes became a feature in practically every stable representative system.

These laws reflected a megapolitical fact. Unions had the raw force to close down and sabotage not only individual firms but whole economies during times when economic activity was disproportionately focused in a few gigantic firms. Technological change has now eclipsed the raw megapolitical power of unions. The smokestacks have become the Rust Belt, the factory worker is a dwindling minority, and his ideology is a dwindling minority ideology.

The new class is the electronic class, whose work is individualistic, often incentive-rewarded, personal rather than impersonal, and related to communications that span the world.

The Great Reckoning (1994)

mewbie_2

Unions? It really is a return to the 70's. It could be argued that the Thatcher driven council house sell off - everybody for themselves - stuff the unions sowed the seeds for the current situation.

Scargill was right! Coal not Dole!!!