Gvment to announce new desperate measures to help poor people afford expensive houses

GreatApe

Sapphire wrote: »

I read somewhere (think it was the Telegraph the other day) that only 19 per cent of 'homes' being built in England are 'affordable'. If only 19 per cent are 'affordable', what is happening to the other 81 per cent? Are they being bought by speculators?

If that is the case, then the government should be making sure that far more than 19 per cent of 'homes' being built must be affordable – otherwise, everywhere is going to end up being concreted over quite needlessly.

And the speculators and builders are only one of the elephants in the room… It is disingenuous of someone like Javid to try to 'blame baby boomers' instead, many of whom started off very poor (in fact living in squalid conditions that were prevalent in much of London until the late 70s), and worked their guts off for decades to achieve a decent standard of living. Perhaps Javid is a property speculator himself?

In house building 'Affordable' actually means social housing. Its got nothing to do with the £££price of the property.

So for instance you can buy a new build house in Telford for £120k but that is not in the 'Affordable' stats because it is not a social house owned by the council or a HA.

On the other hand you can have a £500,000 flat in London which is classed as affordable because it is owned by the council/HA and or is sold on as a shared ownership.

Screwing up the language is a real crap way to do things. They really need to change 'affordable' back into social so people know what the hell it is they are talking about

GreatApe

Windofchange wrote: »

But thousands of people haven't brought their homes. They have brought 25% or whatever of their homes because that is what they can afford. This is the trick isn't it!? How can we keep house prices as high as possible, but also allow people to 'buy' into the dream?

Put it this way, if house prices were affordable, then we wouldn't need help to buy, 40% equity loans, freezing of interest rates for 5 years, BOMAD, Barclays family mortgages and whatever other madness is going to come out of this government in the budget. If they let the market function freely then we would have had a return to normal in 2008 when it all tried to go bang, but of course Cameron's pals wouldn't have had their £60 million pound bonuses.

As I was trying to explain to a friend who has just 'brought' 40% of a London 1 bedder for the best part of 250 grand, she will actually be better with prices collapsing. Yes she loses some equity / goes into negative equity, but the remaining chunk of her flat then becomes more realistic to buy. A 25 year old with a near £500 grand flat earning circa £35k per annum. When you write the figures down the madness of it all becomes crystal clear. Problem is that many under 30 have never known reversing prices, and £500 grand for a 1 bed flat seems to be quite normal.

You confuse price with affordability

Prices are high in the south but property is quite affordable in the south

On the other hand, prices in 1960 were cheap but affordability was terrible so ownership was very low much lower than today.

I know this confuses you, but prices can double prices can go up 10x yet things stay affordable. Surely you should know this is the case you and your pals have been calling it an unaffordable bubble for 15-20 years yet in that time some 25 million people have bought a house

I would argue the opposite, prices in most the country are extremely affordable. The latest stats show that nearly 50% of recent migrants have also bought their own home. These are people who often come here with nothing but the cloths on their backs and they seem to manage to have got to 50% ownership and that will continue to increase.

In most the country buying a starter home is so cheap it costs less than renting in the local council estate.

GreatApe

Private_Church wrote: »

A few years ago it was revealed that the large Construction companies had been running a cartel with regards to black listing workers who were members of a Union. There was a company set up who had all the records of Union members and the cartel would use the system to find out who were members of a union and hence black list them from gaining employment with the companies.

The reason I posted the above is I firmly believe there is a cartel running amongst the House building companies. They landbank large swathes of prime building land and dribble developments onto the market so as not to flood an aear with houses which would reduce prices. If company "A" had a site started with say 500 homes company "B" who has land just a few miles away will put back the start of their development until the company "A" development is nearing completion. Its not rocket science , restrict supply of a product and the value remains high, flood the market with a product and the value falls.

There isn't a lack of site tradesmen in the UK because the quality of workmanship can be dire and the house builders can get away with it. Much of the skill in building homes these days has gone with the advent of things like Truss roofs,metal stud walls, click together pipework etc .

It went on with the likes of Belfour Beatty etc so why not Bovis Homes etc ?.

House building is a cyclical business they sometimes make good margins and sometimes they make heavily negative margins. Over the course of the cycle the house builds do not make huge margins. You can test your conspiracy theories by looking at the public accounts of the uk house builders.

It makes sense to bring to market only a number of properties you can sell at a profit. How do you think they could survive if they bought 500 properties onto the market in a small town all at once? If they did that it would probably take them 10 years to sell them they cant sell it for below costs so its logical and reasonable that in those cases they develop over 10 years rather than 10 months and have most the properties sit empty adding further cost to their balance sheets.

GreatApe

AG47 wrote: »

HTB stands for help to bubble, last desperate attempt to keep the bubble inflated

What bubble?

Houses in most the regions of the UK cost less than paying to rent an equivalent in the local council estate

Even in Birmingham our #2 city you can buy a 3 bedroom terrace for just £120,000
Only the silly crash cheerleaders think that is a bubble. On every reasonable metric £120,000 for a house is cheap.

It costs the same or less than the social homes nearby: Check
It costs less than the blooming reinstatement value: Check

That pretty much covers almost all of Scotland / Wales / N-Ireland / Yorkshire&Humber / North-East / North-West / E-Midlands / W-Midlands

Not just affordable areas, cheap areas

Windofchange

Jack_Johnson_the_acorn wrote: »

A 1 bed flat in Kensington, Westminster or Knightsbrige maybe?

Look at any other prosperous, capital city and you'll find exactly the same thing.

People harking on about how prices are ridiculous compared to when their parents bough are barking up the wrong tree, London is considered luxury now. Whereas before it was just like any other polluted city.

BTW £500,000.00 elsewhere buys you a lot of house in a nice area.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-60060337.html

Nope, Bow in East London.

I agree you will find the same in most other big cities around the developed world. An endless supply of cheap credit and governments 'helping' their citizens. I could find you 10's of thousands of examples of this kind of property all around London. Not prime, not Mayfair or Kensington.

Put it this way - regardless of whether you think prices are fair, high or low, do you think a 25 year old earning around £35k a year should be able to get hold of a £250,000 mortgage and another £250,000 ontop of debt to pay rent on?

Windofchange

GreatApe wrote: »

I would argue the opposite, prices in most the country are extremely affordable. The latest stats show that nearly 50% of recent migrants have also bought their own home. These are people who often come here with nothing but the cloths on their backs and they seem to manage to have got to 50% ownership and that will continue to increase.

This reminds me, I'm still waiting for your response on this from the other day when I asked you how you know 100% of migrants are shoe shine boys or illegal kitchen workers?

You are saying look, 50% of migrants can buy a house in the UK, but as highlighted, you seem to think that migrant = Sub Saharan refugee. Do you not understand that migrant can mean Dubai oil executive, professional footballer, Project Manager etc etc? What if I give you 100 migrants who are premier league footballers and say hey look, they have all brought Chelsea penthouses, look how cheap Chelsea is!

Shall we revisit this in depth for you as you seem to need things spelling out. As you won't open the below report as it's not in your nature to actually research things you post here - the summary from Figure 7.

http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/characteristics-and-outcomes-of-migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market/

"For example in 2015 the real hourly wages for female UK-born and foreign-born were £12.4 and £12.5 respectively, while those for the male UK-born and foreign-born were respectively £15.3 and £14.8. Female migrants’ hourly earnings were higher than those of UK-born women during the entire period under consideration. There has, however, been a trend of convergence in recent years."

So, for this report from 2017 (pretty up to date), female migrants earned more than their UK counterparts, and male migrants earned 50p per hour less.

So, now we have covered the above with actual figures as opposed to ones you have pulled out of your behind, let's see if you can expand on your theory that because 50% of migrants can buy housing it means that it is affordable and cheap?

Cakeguts

Windofchange wrote: »

Nope, Bow in East London.

I agree you will find the same in most other big cities around the developed world. An endless supply of cheap credit and governments 'helping' their citizens. I could find you 10's of thousands of examples of this kind of property all around London. Not prime, not Mayfair or Kensington.

Put it this way - regardless of whether you think prices are fair, high or low, do you think a 25 year old earning around £35k a year should be able to get hold of a £250,000 mortgage and another £250,000 ontop of debt to pay rent on?

A 25 year old earning the equivalent of £35k compared to general salaries has never been able to buy a house in London. They have always rented. The only people who have ever been able to buy in London have been people on very high incomes compared to the rest of the population. What would now be £80 to £100k. Someone earning £35k in London would do a lot better in a different part of the country.

Windofchange

Cakeguts wrote: »

A 25 year old earning the equivalent of £35k compared to general salaries has never been able to buy a house in London. They have always rented. The only people who have ever been able to buy in London have been people on very high incomes compared to the rest of the population. What would now be £80 to £100k. Someone earning £35k in London would do a lot better in a different part of the country.

Absolute nonsense. You reckon there are no low / medium income people in London who have brought houses / flats? You couldn't give houses away in Brixton as an example back in the 80's when the riots were in full swing. My assistant at work owns a 3 bed house in S.E. London, and she has done that job for the past 24 years. She is paid at Band 3 level in the NHS if you want to look up the salaries - around £20k per year currently.

Before the usual suspects pile in with it was never easy etc etc, this isn't an attempt at saying buying was easy back in the day, this is purely a response to cake guts.

ukcarper

What has happened is many parts of London where you would not have wanted to live have been gentrified not only pushing prices up in those areas but increasing demand in others.

Rich2808

Cakeguts wrote: »

A 25 year old earning the equivalent of £35k compared to general salaries has never been able to buy a house in London. They have always rented. The only people who have ever been able to buy in London have been people on very high incomes compared to the rest of the population. What would now be £80 to £100k. Someone earning £35k in London would do a lot better in a different part of the country.

What absolute nonsense.

Prior to about 1997 it was perfectly possible for someone on an average wage to buy a house in the vast majority of London outside the exclusive areas of zone 1. Average prices then were less than £70k and wages really haven't gone up that much in real terms since then.

My dad managed to buy a house in London on a postal workers salary on a single wage with a 1.5 times salary mortgage. Not Knightsbridge or Belgravia I admit but until the early 2000s property in London was relatively affordable even for average earners.