Are you a crash troll?

System

I wish I was born ten years earlier, now I will have to blame my parents......

AnotherJoe

Eric_the_half_a_bee wrote: »

I agree, that is silly. But it is equally silly to imply that anybody who ever suggests that house prices might be due for a fall is an irrational "troll", as the OP effectively seems to think. And supporting that with an analysis which starts in 1996, i.e. cherry picking the best year in the last half century from which to calculate trends, is disingenuous or naive.

Strawman since the OP didn't suggest that. He stated you had to qualify on multiple criteria and that most trolls qualified on all.

"I think if more than 3 or 4 of the above apply to you, then you are probably a crash troll"

AnotherJoe

mrlegend123 wrote: »

Most people on here do not understand the relationship between HP and IR.

High HPs - low IRs

Low HPs - high IRs

Imagine today's HPs at a BR of 5%. HPs would still be stuck at 2009/2010 levels.

Well you certainly dont since there is only a tenuous link, there are many other factors including demand & supply, employment, amount available to lend, sentiment.

One has only to look at radically different house prices and house price inflation rates in different areas of the country, even though interest rates are identical, to see this argument is risible.

Heck when i was struggling to buy a house in the early 80's rates peaked at about 15% but at the time prices were very high,relatively speaking. According to your laughably simplistic analysis I should have got one for free.

System

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Well you certainly dont since there is only a tenuous link, there are many other factors including demand & supply, employment, amount available to lend, sentiment.

One has only to look at radically different house prices and house price inflation rates in different areas of the country, even though interest rates are identical, to see this argument is risible.

Heck when i was struggling to buy a house in the early 80's rates peaked at about 15% but at the time prices were very high,relatively speaking. According to your laughably simplistic analysis I should have got one for free.

I am talking national not regional. Please can you spend some time studying the UK's Mortgage payments as % of income chart overlaying interest rates. Most charts start from the 1980s.

westernpromise

Nobody lives nationally, though. And in London the average earnings figure includes people on low earnings who don't buy, whereas prices are driven by the earnings of those who do; which includes a lot of people whose earnings are not local or who buy from capital and don't rely on mortgage finance. So one would expect London to look different.

Herzlos

wotsthat wrote: »

If they want to buy, and one assumes they do, they may as well get on with it and use low interest rates to their advantage. What's the point of spending years renting when you really want to buy?

That's the thing with house pricing, the best time to buy is almost always right now*; because the savings increase over time. Sure, buying right at the peak before a crash sucks, but it at least gets you onto the market so that you can start saving. Crashes are normally caused by an external source like bank lending (I bought at a fully 5x salary the month of the downturn, but even at a 20% reduction I'd be stuffed if the bank dropped the lending criteria to under 4x salary, which it did).


*Because it's impossible to buy 20 years ago.

westernpromise

Herzlos wrote: »

That's the thing with house pricing, the best time to buy is almost always right now*;

*Because it's impossible to buy 20 years ago.

All crash trolls by definition believe that the only acceptable time to buy was in the past. If you buy now you're mad because there's going to be a crash. If you bought more recently than at that golden moment in the past then you're about to lose those gains you are certainly gloating and rubbing your hands over.

I wonder if crashtrollery is pervasive as it is because it's perhaps a latter-day expression of the instinct to religion, like environmentalism is? If so, there is an anthropological explanation for its prevalence, its lack of rationality and its hostility to unbelievers. There is quite a lot of overlap between them:

• For both crash trolls and the religious, Eden is the dream of a place of their own given them for nothing in the distant past, when the world was good, pure and sparsely populated.
• Evil then entered the world. To the religious evil is the devil and his many agents and guises; to crash trolls evil is house price inflation and its many agents and guises: TPTB, EAs, VIs, boomers, sheeple, landlords, letting agents, George Osborne.
• In the past there was a fall in which our antedecents lost their home.
• The religious think the sins of the father are visited upon the son; crash trolls blame boomers for everything.
• Religions and crash trolls both have religious dogma (it's all the fault of landlords), demons (landlords), the devil (Mark Carney), a priesthood (the louder crash trolls), and a Pope (whatever loony crash troll is loudest this week).
• Both believe that Tribulation is coming (a house price crash) and that heaven on earth (they get a cheap house) will follow.
• When Doomsday fails to happen on time a new Doomsday is set and the old one quietly forgotten about.
• Both have the concepts of sin (being a landlord, owning a house), heresy (you saying something they disagree with), and apostasy (you no longer agreeing with them) and both reserve special venom for those guilty of these.
• Both look down with sneering pity on people who don't share their beliefs, because they are saved and we aren't.
• People who don't share their beliefs get laid more.
• That last one may not be true.

It's all there, isn't it? Shame the crash trolls aren't....

Cornucopia

I think you may have something there... or not.

Either way, I love a good list.

Crashy_Time

System

Herzlos wrote: »

Sure, buying right at the peak before a crash sucks, but it at least gets you onto the market so that you can start saving.

And it also buys you a useful asset you can live in, and which is worth caring for and improving and enjoying.