When do you think house prices will hit the bottom of the market?

thegibdog

December 2010

I'm surprised at the poll results so far too, I can't believe that such a large number of people think the bottom of the market will have been reached in a years time. Just look at the graph, it's got a long way to go yet. The previous crash bottomed out around the last peak but one - 1996 prices were roughly equal to 1980's peak. I see no reason why the bottom of the market, when it comes, shouldn't be around the level of the 1989 peak and can't see us being there by this time next year.

gunnaknow

If you look at the decline shortly after 1989, in the graph, you can see that in 1991 there was a brief decrease in the steepness of decline. I'm sure that many people back then believed this to be a signal of the end of deflation, yet they would have been proved wrong. I wonder if the 0.4% decrease this month is being taken by some people as a signal for the end of deflation. Deflation doesn't necessarily follow a straight line downward, it can bump in places, before continuing it's decent. If that graph was even more detailed, I'm sure that you would be able to observe several more smaller dumps in the decline, similar to this month's bump.

dopester

June 2013 or later

I now hope there is a bull-trap in 2009.

Would be sweet to see more people buying 2nd and 3rd homes as investment properties, only for the market to continue crashing as I expect it will.... and bringing the "investorz" down to size by losing their properties and their own homes, and thus feeding the crash further.

Bring it on.

gunnaknow

Dopester, whilst I too hope for property prices to continue falling, I don't think that it's very honourable for you to wish for people to lose their own homes. You're taking things a little too far; unless you didn't sincerely mean what you said.

dopester

June 2013 or later

gunnaknow wrote: »

Dopester, whilst I too hope for property prices to continue falling, I don't think that it's very honourable for you to wish for people to lose their own homes. You're taking things a little too far; unless you didn't sincerely mean what you said.

gunnaknow, if you re-read what I wrote, you will see it was directed at property speculators, who are itching to try and bag BTL properties for value, in the expectation of an easy ride back to peak 2007 prices.

That includes many who have stated their intentions on this forum, of buying BTLs, with some insane vision that it'll be HPI capital riches for them.

My view is property values are going to crash hard, and, remain at a new market level, well under the mindset of what many posters here have become accustomed to as general prices. And rental values will equally be well under what we see today.

If my post gives a jolt to forum regulars, in that it might not be so HPI easy, that rent values have a long way to drop, that the well-placed for funds BTL hunter might become the prey as the market renews its decent, and focuses their minds on the fact they risk losing their own homes to their creditors if a BTL gamble doesn't pay off and prices continue to fall to the extent I think they will.... then I'm being cruel to be kind to the wannabee BTL parasites.

I don't really want them to lose their homes - but that is a risk many might be taking if they leverage themselves in to BTL if conditions worsen beyond their expectations.

I'd prefer them to recognise just how satisfying it is to have their own main home and perhaps seek alternative investments which have more liquidity to buy/sell quickly, where they can limit exposures, and where their main home isn't at risk from creditors if, for one reason or another, their BTL venture falls apart.

Mary_Hartnell

December 2010

penguine wrote: »

I decided to be an extremist and choose the last date on your list, because I think the global economy is in big trouble and even if we don't have another depression, the recession is going to drag on for a long while. The levels of personal and national debt are unprecedented so I don't see where the money to buy houses at 2000-07 prices is going to come from. I think the rate of decline will start to level out in another year or two, but prices will fall at a much slower rate for some time.

Are you thinking "depression"?

From wikipedia:
A common rule of thumb for a depression is a 10 percent decline in gross domestic product (GDP). The corresponding rule of thumb for recession is two quarters of negative GDP growth. Using these definitions, the threshold for depression is vastly more severe than that for recession. A GDP decline of more than 10 percent has not occurred in the United States since the 1930s.[2]

For what it is worth, I've voted for Christmas 2010, but I have always been an optimist.:D

dopester

June 2013 or later

gunnaknow wrote: »

Dopester, whilst I too hope for property prices to continue falling, I don't think that it's very honourable for you to wish for people to lose their own homes. You're taking things a little too far; unless you didn't sincerely mean what you said.

Also it includes !!!!!!. Still ready to buy a home for himself (great), but also itching to get a BTL. Checking the poll again, and his post on this thread, he thinks the bottom of the house prices will be reached in December 2009 !

The Stockport area is full of over-valued properties and doesn't look well-placed to withstand recession. It could become a bit of a poverty wasteland.

There are reasons that Government funded study of a few months ago said some areas of the UK were non-viable for continued Government spending money (from a Government who may find they have a very restricted spending budget).. and that populations of whole towns and cities should move down south, with new towns to be built there.

People might laugh and dismiss such thinking now... but maybe you've not understood just how seriously outcomes and mindsets may change with a deflationary depression, government funding under severe pressures, and the megapolitical changes that might be forced because of it.

I mean really.. discontinuations in history, can cause major changes. Someone please tell me why so many Angles decided to leave their own land to come over here:

The Angles, who may have come from Angeln, and Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain [3], leaving their former land empty.

The name 'England' or 'Aenglaland' originates from this tribe. [4]

The region was home to the Germanic people, the Angles, who, together with Saxons and Jutes, left their home to migrate to Britain in the 5th-6th centuries. For the years 449-455, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes how king Vortigern (a British king) invited the Angles to come and receive land among them if they would help to defend them against the Picts. Those successful Angles sent word back that good land was available and that the British were worthless (presumably as soldiers).

Or previous downturns which, in the space of just a few years turned from good times to deep poverty, causing people to ship out to new lands where opportunity may be like the USA.

Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow

Even if house prices, and rents, don't crash as much as I expect them to, I still think that BTL will give woeful returns, and comes with extraordinary risk if you can lose your own home if there are cash-flow problems, next to other investments which are capital limit risk controllable.

Policy Exchange reckons we should give up on Northern cities and move everyone to the South-East...
In its latest report, the influential right-wing think tank Policy Exchange argues that regeneration efforts in northern cities like Liverpool and Bradford have failed, leaving them ‘beyond revival’ – and it wants the government to encourage their poor downtrodden inhabitants to migrate to those modern-day Xanadus London, Oxford and Cambridge.

It’s not the first report to criticise the Government’s efforts to bridge inequalities between the regions (The Taxpayers’ Alliance recently put the boot in too) but it goes further: it argues that there’s ‘no realistic prospect’ of bridging this gap, so there’s no point even trying. Instead, it wants the government to free up more land for affordable housing in London, and to concentrate on developing bigger cities in the South-East – with Oxford and Cambridge the two leading candidates.

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/839007/move-scousers-on-says-tory-think-tank/

Time to abandon northern cities?
Places such as Sunderland and Liverpool are in permanent decline and people should be encouraged to move south, a thinktank says
Comments (…)

Do you live in Sunderland? Are your bags packed? Well, the Policy Exchange thinks that perhaps they should be.

In a report (pdf) in which it's sometimes hard to see where the serious thinking ends and the sheer provocation begins, the rightwing thinktank argues that it is unrealistic for "struggling" northern population centres like Sunderland, Bradford and Liverpool to become prosperous again.

Instead, it says - as covered in many papers today that millions more homes should be built in the south-east to make it easier for people to resettle there.

Apart from London, the Oxford and Cambridge areas should see huge building programmes to cater for the northern influx, the report says, adding:

It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland and ask ourselves instead what we need to do to offer people in Sunderland better prospects.

The report has plenty of potential to embarrass David Cameron who, the Times points out, begins a tour of such destinations as Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Morecambe and Liverpool today.

The Policy Exchange has close links with Cameron's party. Founded by the his education spokesman, Michael Gove, it is, the Mail says, "one of the Tories' favourite think-tanks".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2008/aug/13/timetoabandonnortherncitie

dopester

June 2013 or later

Nothing would surprise me now in terms of measures to try and deal with the crisis.

If we were all shunted in to about 60 of these (below) in a few areas down South... with a local power station running to each... and abandon much of the Britain and its high running costs... just keep motorways going to important sections such as for farmland, to a couple of ports.

I don't want to live in one (hate the idea), but wouldn't surprise me if much of Britain was abandoned, due to lack of Government money to keeping running the country on the current scale, and solutions like these were pushed ahead as the answer.

City of the future: The giant glass pyramid that could house one million people

By Niall Firth
Last updated at 8:38 AM on 06th September 2008


With its sharp angles and its glass walls shimmering in the sunlight it looks like a piece of modern art.

But this innovative design is actually a blueprint for the city of the future - a giant glass pyramid that could house up to one million people.

The development, named the 'Ziggurat', will be self sufficient and carbon neutral with power being supplied by wind turbines.

No cars will be allowed inside the 2.3 square kilometre building, with residents being whisked around by a monorail network which operates both horizontally and vertically.

full article here.

harryhound

Reminds me a bit of this country.
The workers housed in huge multi-story warehouses

http://www.destination360.com/asia/china/images/s/china-shanghai.jpg

This is the other side of the river:

http://www.overseaspropertymall.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/shanghai-skyline_b.jpg

I wonder how many of them are in negative equity.

---

And as for those proposing to dump "Skem" on Cambridge, you must be joking; there is already something nearing civil unrest over "eco towns" and "misguided buses".

Details of declining "new" town here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skelmersdale

Probably end up being merged with Basildon, already home to Europe's largest traveller camp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basildon

Nagiw

dopester wrote: »

I now hope there is a bull-trap in 2009.

Would be sweet to see more people buying 2nd and 3rd homes as investment properties, only for the market to continue crashing as I expect it will.... and bringing the "investorz" down to size by losing their properties and their own homes, and thus feeding the crash further.

Bring it on.

What a horrible person.