Ten steps to release pressure on housing market

GeorgeHowell

N1AK wrote: »

Then feel free to help solve the problem by emigrating, not having children or euthanasing the children you've already had :T

The issue with saying the long term solution is less people is that even if it is true then the long term is a considerable number of decades. Making a transition to an economy that would function on a smaller, older population would require vast decreases in public spending, debt etc which cannot be made quickly.

That's exactly why part of UKIPs "going serious" process has been changing from opposing immigration to openly welcoming the idea of increasing the population of the UK by 5 million in the next decade.

Then if increasing population is an inevitability the pressure on housing is unlikely to get any less. Even if building vastly more were sanctioned, the cost of the necessary supporting infrastructure would be immense. Population could at least be stabilised in order to try to stop things getting worse. This by means of strict immigration control (EU exit required) and discouraging procreation. Of course none of that is going to happen and the quality of life in this overcrowded country will continue to deteriorate.

chewmylegoff

N1AK wrote: »

I don't come up with UKIP policy, all I know is that until recently UKIP were anti-immigration and now they are talking about being more selective and letting in 50,000 immigrants a year.

That is lower than the current levels of immigration but it's hardly a complete change of policy.

Doesn't that equate to 500,000 rather than 5 million, or are the other 4,500,000 going to be new imported wives specifically for Farage to prove he definitely isn't xenophobic.

cells

wymondham wrote: »

The best one would have been max mortgage 3x your income....!

that would lead to a very rapid conversion of the housing stock from owner ocupiers to BTLs

in fact IMO the next cycle is going to see just that becuase the limit of 5x income is going to become too low the FTBs are going to be replaced more and more by BTLers

in many ways the HPC crew shoot themselves in the foot by proposing "lets try everything else first" before the one and only true solution to a shortgage of supply and that is to produce more

CLAPTON

cells wrote: »

that would lead to a very rapid conversion of the housing stock from owner ocupiers to BTLs

in fact IMO the next cycle is going to see just that becuase the limit of 5x income is going to become too low the FTBs are going to be replaced more and more by BTLers

in many ways the HPC crew shoot themselves in the foot by proposing "lets try everything else first" before the one and only true solution to a shortgage of supply and that is to produce more

surely not

the solution to the shortage of housing is to build more?

but you could introduce new taxes, create new laws, set up new quangos ...

cells

GeorgeHowell wrote: »

Then if increasing population is an inevitability the pressure on housing is unlikely to get any less. Even if building vastly more were sanctioned, the cost of the necessary supporting infrastructure would be immense. Population could at least be stabilised in order to try to stop things getting worse. This by means of strict immigration control (EU exit required) and discouraging procreation. Of course none of that is going to happen and the quality of life in this overcrowded country will continue to deteriorate.

infrastrucre cost is reduced the more people there are, not only do you benifit in utilising existing infrastructure at a higher capacity but you benifit from lower unit costs per unit of additonal infrastucture

cells

TickersPlaysPop wrote: »

Is there an official statistic for the % of property sales per mth that are buy to let?

even if there was it would be irrelevant as you also need to know how many BTLs landlrods are selling to get an idea of NET purchases

the very best metric is the percentage of private rentals, the more there are the more BTLs there are.

This figure went from just shy of 10% of all houses privately rented (ie about 2.5million homes were BTL) to now just shy of 20% of all houses (eg about 5 million)

When I last checked, the increase was about 300k a year.
So on average 300k homes are added as BTL a year at the moment

as things stand, we could well go to 30% renters, 17% social, 53% Owner as soon as 2025