Is ignorance the cause of high house prices?

zagubov

michaels wrote: »

But most households are not 'long' property. They need one house to live in and they own (with the mortgage company) one house. It is only those with more than one house or ho are planning to downsize and are thus long property who benefit form property price increases.

If I need one house and own one house, apart from negative equity which impacts if I want to move, the number of GBP per house doesn't matter to me. (Except perhaps the higher prices are the higher transaction costs and taxes are which is a negative not a positive of high prices.)

Seeing the house price inflation as a form of increasing wealth is as meaningless as if we assigned cash value to our internal organs and correctly valued those prices as enormous as we need them for life itself. That might make us millionaires but we can never realise the cash.

Most people buy more houses than they sell, as they'll die in their final one. High prices are therefore a burden on the purchaser.

GreatApe

zagubov wrote: »

Seeing the house price inflation as a form of increasing wealth is as meaningless as if we assigned cash value to our internal organs and correctly valued those prices as enormous as we need them for life itself. That might make us millionaires but we can never realise the cash.

Most people buy more houses than they sell, as they'll die in their final one. High prices are therefore a burden on the purchaser.

Most UK born Brits inherit more housing than they consume so we are net sellers

This is primarily because most UK born women have fewer than two kids.

zagubov

GreatApe wrote: »

Most UK born Brits inherit more housing than they consume so we are net sellers

Sure, and there will be plenty of room for them of this infinite flat earth of [STRIKE]currently-dying [/STRIKE]/ [STRIKE]not-quite dying yet [/STRIKE]/ perhaps-having-their-property-used-to-pay-for-care-homes temporary property-owners.

House ownership hasn't previously been such an obsession in the long-lived generation that are retired now.

I think house inheritors will be looking from their zimmer frames to their pension books and their new inherited homes, and saying "in a rational world this would have been useful to me when I was young with a growing family and needed the space".

We need enough housing for all generations to have their homes. It's doable and it needs doing.

economic

zagubov wrote: »

Sure, and there will be plenty of room for them of this infinite flat earth of [STRIKE]currently-dying [/STRIKE]/ [STRIKE]not-quite dying yet [/STRIKE]/ perhaps-having-their-property-used-to-pay-for-care-homes temporary property-owners.

House ownership hasn't previously been such an obsession in the long-lived generation that are retired now.

I think house inheritors will be looking from their zimmer frames to their pension books and their new inherited homes, and saying "in a rational world this would have been useful to me when I was young with a growing family and needed the space".

We need enough housing for all generations to have their homes. It's doable and it needs doing.

Its already done

zagubov

economic wrote: »

Its already done

Well, about time too!:beer::T

For your next task, can you also fix the climate please! it's all going horribly wrong!

GreatApe

zagubov wrote: »

Sure, and there will be plenty of room for them of this infinite flat earth of [STRIKE]currently-dying [/STRIKE]/ [STRIKE]not-quite dying yet [/STRIKE]/ perhaps-having-their-property-used-to-pay-for-care-homes temporary property-owners.

House ownership hasn't previously been such an obsession in the long-lived generation that are retired now.

I think house inheritors will be looking from their zimmer frames to their pension books and their new inherited homes, and saying "in a rational world this would have been useful to me when I was young with a growing family and needed the space".

We need enough housing for all generations to have their homes. It's doable and it needs doing.

If we built 5.5 million more homes we would have as many homes as the Germans on a per capita basis. Yet the Germans also complain of a shortage.
The simple fact is you can never have enough homes in a successful growing economy

The only solution to have cheap homes is to have a crap economy with lots of unemployed and people leaving the country in their hundreds of thousands then you can have cheap housing. That is pretty much what happened to London and especially inner London in the 1990s. London population abandoned the city it was a ghetto and crime and unemployment was high. London lost 1.3 million people from 1950-1900 and the result was 1990 London waa very cheap

So pick your choice a perminant recession with the population abandoning the UK or a strong economy with non cheap housing. I would prefer the strong economy and non cheap housing. At least you can work on London for abfew years and then go and buy a house outright in stoke for £100,000

Cakeguts

zagubov wrote: »

Well, about time too!:beer::T

For your next task, can you also fix the climate please! it's all going horribly wrong!

Not as horribly wrong as it did just after the last ice age. Then it fluctuated by rising around 7 to 10 degrees C over only about 20 years and then slowly reducing over the next 100 or so before doing it again. Not caused by humans. There weren't enough of them.

Lots of people don't know that the earth can raise temperatures on its own without any human help.
They tend to think it only gets hotter when humans cause it but that isn't the case.

Climate change may not be anything to do with human activities. No one can prove that it is when you know about the huge temperature fluctuations at the end of the last ice age. It has made me think that there is a lot of money in carbon trading and the like. It is very difficult to know what is actually going on because of the number of vested interests.

GreatApe

zagubov wrote: »

Well, about time too!:beer::T

For your next task, can you also fix the climate please! it's all going horribly wrong!

Humanity can easily control the climate by varying the amount of sunshine that is reflected back into space. We don't do this because nobody knows what the best temperature is for earth. In fact there is no best climate. At any given temperature its best for one species at one location but not best for other species at other locations. We could even terraform the plants. Fertilise the oceans and green the deserts. But we don't do that either because there is no best solution.

The whole climate change issue is just a bunch of lefties who's only goal is the destruction of the hominoid species or at least the destruction of capatilism.

GreatApe

I was having a think about house prices and one of the reason why prices have been increasing over the past 5 years is that the employment rate has grown faster than the number of households.

What this means in practice is that there are more 2 worker households than there were five years ago. That is a massive difference in earnings. It is also one of the reasons why just looking at earnings is not the full picture. The left cry that real earnings are down 1% compared to the peak quarter of the last bubble in 2007.

OK that might be true earnings are down marginally vs the peak of the last bubble but a household that went from one earner earning 100% to two earners earning 99% each is a lot better off now.

The UK economy has been doing well over the last five years.
If the brexit vote hadn't happened we would be booming right now
But even that will work itself out in a year or two.

As I keep saying things are going well.
We have high wages full employment lots of opportunity and freedom
Viva LA free market capatilism. It even makes its biggest detractors rich.

economic

Cakeguts wrote: »

Not as horribly wrong as it did just after the last ice age. Then it fluctuated by rising around 7 to 10 degrees C over only about 20 years and then slowly reducing over the next 100 or so before doing it again. Not caused by humans. There weren't enough of them.

Lots of people don't know that the earth can raise temperatures on its own without any human help.
They tend to think it only gets hotter when humans cause it but that isn't the case.

Climate change may not be anything to do with human activities. No one can prove that it is when you know about the huge temperature fluctuations at the end of the last ice age. It has made me think that there is a lot of money in carbon trading and the like. It is very difficult to know what is actually going on because of the number of vested interests.

From what i have been reading, we are on the verge of a new global cooling period. Maybe humans will cause this too? hahahaaha