Brexit, the economy and house prices part 5

kabayiri

mayonnaise wrote: »

Not sure how living the public servant life in Devon makes you the expert?
Anyway, as always, Hamish is correct.
Large swathes of the South East (even within the M25) are indeed empty. And I'm not talking greenbelt land.
Perceptions of congestion are fed by bad town/city planning, awful traffic management, etc....not overpopulation.

None of these things are going to go away anytime soon though.

It took 4 years of roadworks around Manchester to improve the network to gain a predicted 7 minutes per journey.

At that rate we could be looking at decades before any real progress is made.

I was looking at the HS2 route plans out of London. One of the reason the project is hideously expensive is the vast amount of tunneling to get the link out of the capital. As you concentrate more resources it becomes increasingly difficult and costly to make improvements.

mayonnaise

ukcarper wrote: »

Care to point some out inside M25.

Sure.
Take the M3 from the M25 London bound. You'll drive for nearly 10 miles before you get to Sunbury and see your first house.
Take the A30 from the M25 London bound. Again, miles and miles of emptiness before you bump into Hounslow.

Empty.

Tromking

mayonnaise wrote: »

Not sure how living the public servant life in Devon makes you the expert?
Anyway, as always, Hamish is correct.
Large swathes of the South East (even within the M25) are indeed empty. And I'm not talking greenbelt land.
Perceptions of congestion are fed by bad town/city planning, awful traffic management, etc....not overpopulation.

Not declaring myself an expert, just the irony of a Scot pontificating about over population when he lives in area where such concerns are non existent, and if they ever were they would be greatly alleviated by a per head spend on public services in Scotland that is considerably more generous than other regions of the UK enjoy, including my own.

Herzlos

Yeah there's definitely infrastructure issues, but most of them can be overcome with proper planning. There are cities in the world that dwarf London and still manage, so it's not as if there's any real upper limit on how much water/power/transport links you can provide to a given area.

Any increase in used land should be coming with suitable infrastructure.

But it's just not correct to claim we're overcrowded or full when we're empirically not.

Tromking wrote: »

You never tested your theory and took the plunge and moved home I take it?
I wonder what factors where at play when you decided not to move England.

I didn't realise you needed to live somewhere to see how much of it was built on.

ukcarper wrote: »

Care to point some out inside M25.

What's the obsession with the M25? There's a lot of the country that's outside the M25.

Herzlos

Tromking wrote: »

Not declaring myself an expert, just the irony of a Scot pontificating about over population when he lives in area where such concerns are non existent

You missed the part about him working in the SE, then?

Staffybullterrier

First of all Brexit or no Brexit the best way to get house prices down all over the country is to tax the buy to let landlords out of existence then we can go back to a situation when Maggie was in power ( YES MAGGIE THATCHER ) when home ownership was at the highest its ever been.
Secondly the EU is just another layer of very very expensive pen pushers that we can do without. Full stop.
Thirdly youngsters cannot get on the housing ladder because they spend too much on Starbucks, the latest phones, the souped up high insurance cars, the gap year out and finally half of them are not clever enough to go to university anyway. All the teachers , lecturers and politicians are kidding youngsters into thinking that they are all going to fall into their dream job and earn £70K a year .Some of them need to take a reality check and perhaps learn a trade instead .At least you wont have the student debt around your neck.

Tromking

Herzlos wrote: »

You missed the part about him working in the SE, then?

Nope, don’t think so.
I think the more pertinent fact is where he chose to live, which wasn’t the more popular areas for migration of the Midlands and the SE.

ukcarper

mayonnaise wrote: »

Sure.
Take the M3 from the M25 London bound. You'll drive for nearly 10 miles before you get to Sunbury and see your first house.
Take the A30 from the M25 London bound. Again, miles and miles of emptiness before you bump into Hounslow.

Empty.

M25 You mean the Thames floodplain and loads of gravel pits.

A30 Staines reservoirs and Heathrow

mayonnaise

Tromking wrote: »

Nope, don’t think so.
I think the more pertinent fact is where he chose to live, which wasn’t the more popular areas for migration of the Midlands and the SE.

I think it's the weather.
Hamish suffers from severe heat exhaustion whenever it gets warmer than 12C.

westernpromise

Staffybullterrier wrote: »

First of all Brexit or no Brexit the best way to get house prices down all over the country is to tax the buy to let landlords out of existence

Not so simple, unfortunately.

Renters occupy property more densely than do owners, so in a 100 sq m property you would typically find either three owner-occupiers or four renters.

If such a house were to be sold, there's only room for three of the renters to become owner-occupiers. The fourth won't fit into it on normal occupancy levels. So one will need to find a rental from a supply that has just shrunk by one house.

The lazy assumption that you can move housing from the rented to the owned sector with no impact on occupancy levels is false. You will diminish the demand for renting but you'll diminish the supply more, and we all know what happens to house prices when that situation arises.

You also have to consider whether what you're proposing will eliminate the private rented sector altogether. Is that a goal? If so, why? What major economy with no PRS functions successfully?

Buying more rental property right now looks risky, but holding on to whatever you've already got looks sensible given the prospects for rents and yields.