Womens wages have increased house prices

RHemmings

givememoney wrote:

I didn't say "pushed up the cost of living" I said house prices. We paid £26,000 for our house back in 1979 and taking into account the inflation our house should now be worth around £90,000 but it is worth about £300,000 so you can see where it has all gone awry.

If you didn't have the pressure of work you would have more time to see friends, why should you have work yourself into the ground having a family is enough work itself I say.

But houses were very cheap in the mid 90s, even though by that time women had been working for decades. I think that there are a lot of people looking for any excuse for house prices being high as long as that excuse isn't something that is going to change.

MortgageMamma

Correct, I bought my first house in 1997 for 35k, a 3 bed semi in a good area. Its now worth over 200k - I don't own it anymore!

ABN

I agreee with the OP

I blame the suffragettes. Life was so much simpler then. Women knew their place and all that

But do agree that when women did start to work was the cause of "inflation". More money became available, more need to keep up with the jones etc

suffolkb

Where is Saucepot when you need him?

richgirl

Women working has increased the supply of money chasing the same supply of housing and hence has helped push prices higher, it seems rather obvious, instead of single wage earner families of £30k there are many joint earners of say £50k, and hence the price of houses has risen to reflect this.

Additionally other factors have boosted the price of property that have little to do with women working, such as low interest rates, population growth, and buy to let investments.

Another one coming soon will be the REITS.

RHemmings

gizmoleeds wrote:

This is an interesting theory, but I can think of a few other reasons why house prices have risen:

• selling off council houses, which created a whole new generation of homeowners with the means to place demand on other, non-council houses;
• the decision to use the revenues from council house sales not to build more houses, but to reduce taxes;
• demographic shifts - the increasing breakups of marriages and people wanting to live on their own means more houses are needed even if the population remains static;
• the population isn't remaining static - it is increasing;
• the population is also wealthier with far fewer unemployed than there were in previous decades;
• we have low interest rates, allowing new house buyers to borrow more for the same monthly payments;
• green-belt land policies preventing us from building houses where they are most needed.

...and I'm sure there are more I haven't thought of.

Basically, everything that could increase house prices either has happened or is happening.

Absolutely nothing to do with a speculative bubble then?

Hereward

givememoney wrote:

I didn't say "pushed up the cost of living" I said house prices. We paid £26,000 for our house back in 1979 and taking into account the inflation our house should now be worth around £90,000 but it is worth about £300,000 so you can see where it has all gone awry.

If you didn't have the pressure of work you would have more time to see friends, why should you have work yourself into the ground having a family is enough work itself I say.

Interesting, you state that you didn't say the cost of living, but of houses, but then go on to use the Retail Price Index (RPI), which is a measure of the rise in the cost of living (I make the house in your example worth £91,237 if you use RPI). What you need to remember about RPI, and other measures of inflation, is that the only measure the average change in price for the commodities being measured; therefore, some things will rise faster in price, whilst other will rise slowly, or in deed fall, in price.

Hereward

RHemmings wrote:

Absolutely nothing to do with a speculative bubble then?

I don’t think there is a speculative bubble in property. There may be a few isolated cases of people purchasing property to try to realise some gains in the rising prices of property, but I do not feel that these people are in the majority just yet. It is my opinion that the recent rises in the value of property can be linked to the lifestyle choices of those that are buying the property: that is, people want to live in “decent” areas that match their ideals. These rises should also be linked to the government’s policy of regenerating areas of poverty, which increases people’s expectations of an area and removes low value property from the market.

conradmum

Wow. I blinked and suddenly I'm back in the 1950's.
Yes, of course, let's get women back in the home and house prices will suddenly plummet.
Given that there are far more people who own their own homes now compared to back in 1960's/1970's, and given that the UK has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world, if we're going down the coincidence = causality route, then we should be saying that women's wages have increased our capacity to buy our own homes, not decreased it.

Pennywise

Prices will always go up if people can afford it and will always reach a plateau at the pain threshold.

The reason house prices are so high is that people continue to pay ridiculous amounts of money for them, and to do so, have to work longer hours, do more overtime, take 2 (or more) jobs, etc etc.

I'm too young to remember him, but I remember reading one of Bevin's speeches at school which basically warned against encouraging wives to work as an inevitable result would be that house prices would rise! I only wish I could find the speech as I'd love to study it (and other things he said) again.

It is mortgages that are crippling people. A holiday is just a few hundred pounds, dishwashers are only £200 or so, Ipods and mobile phones are really quite cheap and anyway these are irregular or one-offs. But a typical mortgage is £500-£1000 PER MONTH which takes far more of the take home pay than ever before.

I have nothing against wives working. However, when their wages were first taken into account many years ago, the multiples should have been changed so that it was, say 4 times earnings of the main earner, or 2 times joint earnings - i.e. by all means take into account the wages of all earners in the household, but divide it by the number of earners. Such a policy would have kept a lid on house prices and we'd all be better off now.