How much more would you pay....

DervProf

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

The toilet fairy doesn't come around and deposit a free indoor loo in every house.

The toilet fairy is about to make a deposit in my loo.

:dance:

DervProf

Graham_Devon wrote: »

This is actually quite interesting Hamish, will give you your dues.

I'm going to take another angle on it though, and for this, I'm gonna have to be imaginative.

You are suggesting that indoor bathrooms, fitted kitchens etc have upped the average value of houses in the UK, vs a few decades ago.

Maybe a little "off the mark", but may I suggest that Multi Core CPUs, gigabytes of RAM, 1 TB+ hard drives and 3D graphics cards have not upped the average value of a PC vs a few decades ago. Way better PCs for more or less the same £££.

I seem to remember double glazing being relatively more expensive than it is today, but mass production has bought the price down, just like with PC components.

N1AK

The first and most important point is that house prices have very little to do with 'actual' value. The vast majority of house value is decided by the comparitive levels of supply and demand, peoples confidence in the market and general confidence in the economy.

One fact that shows the lack of a link between 'quality' and price is that house prices stagnated in the 90s. Unless you are of the belief that houses did not improve during this period, the link between improvements and house prices is clearly limited.

The second, and no less important point is that you're suggesting that an increase in product quality must be linked to an increase in product cost. This is rarely true, beyond a comparitively short period of time, and there is no compelling reason to believe houses are the exception so far in this thread.

the_flying_pig

N1AK wrote: »

The first and most important point is that house prices have very little to do with 'actual' value. The vast majority of house value is decided by the comparitive levels of supply and demand, peoples confidence in the market and general confidence in the economy.

One fact that shows the lack of a link between 'quality' and price is that house prices stagnated in the 90s. Unless you are of the belief that houses did not improve during this period, the link between improvements and house prices is clearly limited.

The second, and no less important point is that you're suggesting that an increase in product quality must be linked to an increase in product cost. This is rarely true, beyond a comparitively short period of time, and there is no compelling reason to believe houses are the exception so far in this thread.

Residential pwoperdee is a whole series of bidding markets.

People tend to buy the best thing they can afford. Whether that’s a very basic dwelling with no central heating or some kind of spaceship, the desire to keep up with, or outdo, the Joneses means that they’ll typically borrow as much as they can given their income [historically banks tended to exercise enough restraint with their lending, and do sufficient checks about incomes and so on. such that there wasn’t really a pressing need for an individual to consider whether they could afford repayments or not although the extent to which this remains true is clearly debatable] and buy whatever it is they can buy with that amount of money.

They don’t say things like, ‘ooh, look, a new type of triple glazing has been invented, let’s increase our househunting budget’ or even, as a rule, things like ‘hey, I’m worried about the impact of rising sea levels on future pwoperdee – let’s cut our househunting budget & spend the extra cash on something else’. They spend as much as they’re able to on the best thing they can get for that money.

Hamish knows all of this well enough to the extent that his sorry little mind [I was recently reading an issue of Viz featuring the character Fru-T-Bun, a baker who becomes obsessed with the gingerbread dolls that he bakes to the extent that he starts to enter into physical relationships with them – I fear that poor H is going the same way with bricks’n’mortar] is capable of grinding through the necessary gears.

So, Hamish's initial premise that improved housing quality has somehow caused higher prices is clearly a nonsense. I'll be generous to him and suggest that there might be a germ of semi-related truth in what he says - Whilst improved quality hasn't in any way caused higher prices, it could be argued that it has, from a 'fairness' perspective, provided an element of compensation for today's buyers who are adversely affected by higher prices. But, of course, quality hasn't really changed at all since the turn of the milennium, a time at which prices were entirely sensible.