House Prices UP 3.5% YOY. Land Registry

Joe_Bloggs

@zar.
Good luck in your Phd. It might be wise to have several strings to your bow to focus on, in the case of a set of data fits nothing at all. Hopefully you can make sense of the creatures in question and predict their behavior in the whole.

Some species of birds co-operate if they are related to bring up the young of the common genome. Other species fight beak and claw for space and resources. Birds have been at this far longer than humans. Their decision making structure may not be based upon statistical knowledge of the probable outcome but from an instinctive decisions that are inbread. Birds have needs. Ducks /geese often fly around the world if they feel they can get a better deal elsewhere.
J_B.

I remember the film Enemy of the State that started of with someone counting ducks and they were reduced in dimension a few minutes after witnessing a murder by a lake.
J_B. (The lake was innocent.)

dean_ham

Put it this way, i am a FTB, and will be looking for my first home *if* i taken on in my apprenticeship as an electrical technican.

My salary will be £28k a year.

Now i live in the Rhondda Valleys. Which isnt the best place to live in the Uk, far from it. I class it as below average area to live in the UK.

To buy a 2/3 bed terrace that needs work doing to it will cost me £60k ish. One that Doesnt need work doing to it will cost £80-90k, anything upto 125k !!! FOR A 3 BED TERRACE, are these people having a joke.
With newly built 3/4 semi/detatched homes going for £150-250k.

Say if i was to go for a £60k home and spend £10k doing it up = £70k (which isnt that bad, and im lucky i live in an area where a 3 bed terrace isnt £150k)

Well i say lucky, £70k mortage will cost what? £350-400 a month?


Taking the cost of running a home + running a car to get to work and back, im looking at spending £1500-1600 JUST TO RUN A HOME.

OK i can afford the mortgage payments, but the cost of living are astronomical!!

So my £28k salary, that i have worked my !!!!!! off to get for the last 15 years of my education, i am left with £1750 AFTER STUPID TAX AND NATIONAL INSURANCE.

WHICH GIVES ME £150-250 to treat myself and save towards a rainy day at the end of the month....

I give up, had enough of this county already and im only 20. Seriously thinking about moving out of this dump and emigrating to a better life, away from MR Blair.

zar

I agree that's it very depressing to be young and wanting to have your own house and even if you can stretch to it now you know it might not be sensible as it doesn't leave you much flexibility in the future.

I'd love house prices to drop so that when I (hopefully/eventually) finish my phd my DH and I will be able to buy our own house - but I'm pretty gloomy about that possibility as we are expecting to both be working in the charity sector (as he is now). If I felt we'd be earning siginificantly more in our 30s (we're mid-twenties now) maybe I'd be more optimistic. (I realise I could sell-out and earn more if I chose a different career path but that's not really me!)

At the moment we live in Kent so obviously prices are high (apart from the dodgy areas) but we're not tied here, I come from the midlands and have lived in mid-Wales and East Yorkshire, so we'd be fully prepared to move to wherever house prices were cheapest - but basically at the moment that's nowhere! :mad:

Good luck with the electrical technician stuff job btw! - or with emigrating if that's what you decide to do

Zar - going into her 21st(!) year of education and unlikely to become a homeowner for some time yet...

Joe_Bloggs

@dean_ham
You can set up on your own once you have studied the relevant business material and have sufficient experience in your field. Study plumbing once you know the electrics and master the art of plastering, then you are on to £100K but probably not anywhere near that in the Rhonda. Once you have these skills you could always pass them on to an apprentice who would be working for you.

I remember a coke factory. The taste stuck in my throat. The name and place escapes me. The landscape is forever in my mind.

J_B. (Coke as in burnt coal.)

Joe_Bloggs

I'm doing a phd in statistics and although it has nothing to do with economics in a weird way its a similar problem. I'm working with counts of ducks in winter, and how do you construct an index that tells you whether the national population is going up or down - conservationists want to know if there's a crash in one species, and fisherman want to know if there's a boom in another! Something that makes it a difficult problem is that different things happen in different parts of the country - just like with house prices.

Ducks don't eat fish ! I am sure you realised this. Often it is the other way round (Carp, this is a predatory fish and not a spelling mistake).
You have to count the individuals concerned. Year on year the statistics may reflect the past situation. The underlying causes to the changes, are found in the economics rather than just the gathered statistics considered in isolation.

J_B.(Economics is an art, with a bit of maths tacked on to make it appear more difficult.)

zar

Joe_Bloggs wrote:

Ducks don't eat fish ! I am sure you realised this. Often it is the other way round (Carp, this is a predatory fish and not a spelling mistake).
You have to count the individuals concerned. Year on year the statistics may reflect the past situation. The underlying causes to the changes, are found in the economics rather than just the gathered statistics considered in isolation.)

I'm looking at other waterbirds as well as ducks but there are a few fish-eating ducks including goosander and merganser...

Interesting how similar problems in biology and economics can be when you strip them right down - lots of complicated factors such as what the weather was like last year with birds, or what the interest rate changes have been for the past year with houses. :cool:

Joe_Bloggs wrote:

J_B.(Economics is an art, with a bit of maths tacked on to make it appear more difficult.)

Many mathematicians claim that maths is also an art, but that's a whole other debate and I'd better stop taking the thread off topic.

Joe_Bloggs

@zar
I used to be woken up by the calls of geese about to land on a pond in the morning. I did see a mother and her children guiding a lost goose to the same pond. Driving geese is a lost art. Hand waving gestures are often enough.
Don't ignore the puffin if sea fishing is an issue. Also don't ignore the skua that can steal the fish from the beak of a puffin in mid air. There is considerable persuasion required before the puffin, that caught the fish underwater, can release their beak and let the fish fall to be snapped up.
J_B.

meanmachine_2

Are people suddenly talking in code?

I'm confused. Ducks, fish...

Is it one of these "oysters or snails" discussions?

I'm a snail man myself. I think...

EDIT: By the way, I went on a couple more viewings at the weekend. Boy, is property a complete waste of money. An ex rental one bedder, with kitchen and bathroom both lacking natural light, for nearly 190K. Yeah, pull the other one.

And are Estate agents genetically predisposed to telling porkies? They really are a breed unlike any other, like used car salesmen, but even more slippery. I switch off after a while, so the spiel is entirely self-defeating.

isasmurf

zar wrote:

Exactly - thanks for this example! One of pet peeves is the mean being used as the "average" in economic data such as this - salaries is another one that really annoys me. e.g. the "average" graduate starting salary is £22k or something ridiculous (usually based on just the blue chip graduate jobs as well!) and then all these 1000s of graduates are surprised when they don't get a job earning that much! :rolleyes:

Average Earnings are based on the median

meanmachine wrote:

It is astonishing how statistics are fiddled.

Not fiddled, just misinterpreted by people that don't know better.

zar wrote:

I'm doing a phd in statistics ...
... but I hate numbers!)

:rotfl: What are you doing a PhD in statistics for then!

Woby_Tide

dean_ham wrote:

Well i say lucky, £70k mortage will cost what? £350-400 a month?


Taking the cost of running a home + running a car to get to work and back, im looking at spending £1500-1600 JUST TO RUN A HOME.

OK i can afford the mortgage payments, but the cost of living are astronomical!!

Intrigued by the calculations you've worked out, excluding your mortgage payments that's £1200 to run a 2/3 bed terrace with 1 person in it? Either you must have a lot of car incidentals due to work or something or I think you've over-estimated some cost. Just rough calculations but I estimate we run a family of 3 on under £900 and even that includes a fair bit of excess that could be trimmed if I didn't prefer some of the finer things in life