What makes you think housing is going to become ''easily'' affordable?

adr0ck

other things have got cheaper which means we are able to put more money towards paying for a house

boinging_2

adr0ck wrote: »

other things have got cheaper which means we are able to put more money towards paying for a house

True, plasma TV's are now only £700 instead of £1500, ASDA does suits for £10 and sofa's are now £100 from Ikea.

Yet every time I fill my car up I'm paying £10 more and shopping which I do at least once a week is going up each week.

adr0ck

boinging wrote: »

True, plasma TV's are now only £700 instead of £1500, ASDA does suits for £10 and sofa's are now £100 from Ikea.

Yet every time I fill my car up I'm paying £10 more and shopping which I do at least once a week is going up each week.

yes prices have started to go up again

though its still cheap to run a car now compared to years ago

and its not going to get any cheaper.........................prices are going to keep going up and up

boinging_2

adr0ck wrote: »

yes prices have started to go up again

though its still cheap to run a car now compared to years ago

and its not going to get any cheaper.........................prices are going to keep going up and up

Not sure I understand how it's cheap to run a car....petrol up, road tax up, insurance up, car prices up, road charging (congestion charge etc)...

Any way the point is what you save on the things you buy perhaps once every ten years is easily dwarfed by the rocketing price of every day purchases... so no spare cash overall.

dannyboycey

adr0ck wrote: »

other things have got cheaper which means we are able to put more money towards paying for a house

Stuff that you don't actually need, like TV's, games, music, DVD's have all got much cheaper (coincidentally, all the things they use to measure inflation... funny that!). However stuff that you actually have to buy like food, petrol, gas and electricity have rocketed.

Paul_N_4

adr0ck wrote: »

other things have got cheaper which means we are able to put more money towards paying for a house

That is true for the last few years. Thanks to cheap labour abroad a lot of what we buy has got cheaper, both essentials like food, and luxuries like big TVs, which has kept inflation low. Credit has also been cheap. As a result people have more money, and can get their hands on more money, which has pushed house prices up.

When credit becomes more expensive or scarce (which we're now seeing), and inflation starts to rise (which we're now seeing), people have less money and house prices will start to fall (which we're now seeing).

thegibdog

To reply to the original post, I don't think houses will become easily affordable, they are becoming less affordable. Fewer people are able to afford to pay the over-inflated prices which is leading to a decrease in house prices. And these drops are already happening, such as flats in the block we are currently renting in being sold for less than £90k recently whereas they sold for £130k last year.

fc123

Dan: wrote: »

I wouldn't take too much notice of the nonsense that is sometimes aired in this forum.

It is always going to be difficult to buy your first home, but that has always been the case - it makes me laugh when some people reckon it was a piece of p!ss to buy a house 10/20 years ago.

These days FTB set their expectations way to high. They come out of Uni, get a job with a salary of 25K and expect to be able to buy a 3-bed semi with a double garage. When they discover they can only afford a 1-bed in a less desirable area of town they complain they are priced out of the market.

Start at the bottom.

That's exactly what it was like unless you inherited during ones 20's.....I knew people who inherited grandparents house; no inheritance taxes to pay , so could buy themselves a house....now taxes take a chunk due to HPI.

adr0ck

boinging wrote: »

Not sure I understand how it's cheap to run a car....petrol up, road tax up, insurance up, car prices up, road charging (congestion charge etc)...


.

true boinging

but go back 30 years and it was much more expensive to drive a car

baileysbattlebus

It has always been difficult to buy your first house and when we did, like a poster mentioned on here, we had to and meet the BS manager etc, and the multiples were 3x main income +1 second income. This was the Halifax in 1982, in the days before it was a bank.

Not everyone could buy a house and not everyone did, especially when they were young. Between 1981 and 2003/4 the number owner occupiers increased from 12 million to 18 million, below is a snippet from National Statistics.
Probably made a bit of difference to house prices.
I'm assuming the figures don't include BTL as it does say owner occupiers.


"In 2003/04, 70 per cent of dwellings (18 million) in Great Britain were owner-occupied. This was an increase of 45 per cent from 12 million in 1981. Over the same period the number of homes rented in the social sector declined steadily. In 1981 there were 7 million dwellings in this sector. By 2003 the number had fallen by one quarter to just under 5 million."

Here is the link
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1105