Roll up. Make your housing market prediction here.

GingeG

em your actually the 101st!

Congratulations.

ChrisB_4

I predict a crash in around 15 years.. when the current glut of primary schools reaches the housing market.

Birthrate is at all-time low in many areas - down to 1.2.

The primary schools across the UK right now are experiencing a drop in numbers to the extent that friends of mine are seeing 200+ applications for the same teaching role in northern english zones. The same cannot be said for 2nd'ary... yet. The same can be said for housing market in 15 years. The first-timers drive the market.

meanmachine_2

Surely it's those school kids, armed with their dumbed down qualifications, but more importantly, their £15K of average debt, that is going to drag the market down over the next 5-10 years...?

I graduated back in the 90s, and was the only one in my year, that I know of, not to have debts. I was a very mean meanmachine. Most people emerged with debts of around £5K.

Now it's the norm to have debts more than £15K.

I would never consider buying until I'd got rid of that millstone, so who, in 5 years' time, is going to be buying the FTBer properties? And if it isn't investors, then the market is surely going to stay dead for a long time.

Or am I missing something?

I really do believe that todays prices could be the max until at least 2010.

Poppy9

According to BBC house prices down again August.


BBC

meanmachine_2

Not according to the BBC, according to Hometrack.

You really do need to keep an eye on where they get their info from. Normally it's a v lazy regurgitation of some press release.

Hometrack look at just England and Wales, which is why their index has been negative for that past year.

The rather less scary indices, Nationwide and Halifax - both lenders, surprise surprise, look at the whole country.

All of them also measure different things. It's deliberately designed to fog the issue and give the impression that everything is "stable".

Poppy9

Regardless of where the infol comes from if the BBC publise via their news items that the housing market is in decline, buyers will take this on board and re-assess their offers.

meanmachine_2

Sure but the public are largely stupid, so when the Halifax comes out in a few week's time with "prices have risen 0.2%" everyone just thinks they've gone back up again!

They don't look beyond the spin and see that only Scotland and NI are stopping the indices from plunging month by month.

rozeepozee

meanmachine wrote:

Oh great. My own forum stalker. Yawn

Happily for me, it's a low risk bet as my grannies are both dead.

Aww! Don't be mean to meanmachine. I'm sure he has a soft underbelly.... :rolleyes:

rozeepozee

Oh and back on thread, I'll take a punt and say 20% by the end of 2007 :whistle:

nearlyrich

Prices still seem to be rising where we are but without looking up every house that sells you don't know that the price advertised is the one it sold for and houses seem to be on the market for longer than they used to be. The rise or fall won't really affect us as we have a property, bought in 1992, for which we paid 25% of the value now and the mortgage ended 3 years ago. I can't see us wanting to move from here as we have everything we need and it's a great place to live.

I think overall the market will fall but that's because in general the current market has nowhere for first timers to start, a 2 bed terraced house is over £100k in an area where most people are on minimum wages. We could not have bought this place at todays prices, we wouldn't have taken such a big mortgage even if we could afford it on paper.