Property prices thread

[Sheilbh]

Meanwhile in the rental market:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65103937


Rental cost for a room in a shared flat/house is nos over £700 in every London borough. Across London it's now over £1,000 - for a room

Trends in other cities like Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow etc are big increases too.

[Josquius]

Have to say as much as news reports are fairly doom /hopeful for the market being in decline I'm seeing tonnes of sold signs locally.

[Tamas]

Have to say as much as news reports are fairly doom /hopeful for the market being in decline I'm seeing tonnes of sold signs locally.

I mean, the question is how much they are selling for, isn't it?

[Josquius]

Have to say as much as news reports are fairly doom /hopeful for the market being in decline I'm seeing tonnes of sold signs locally.

I mean, the question is how much they are selling for, isn't it?

A big part of the problem I thought was people not buying expecting prices to plummet.

But regardless. House across the street from me just gone up for sale for 40% or so more than I paid at the start of lockdown.

[Tamas]

Well for sold prices to fall people need to buy.

But yeah. Via people I watch/follow I happened on a weekly youtube "show" for estate agents going through statistics. Average asking prices just seem to have stopped rising this year, but the number that has not stopped rising is the number of price changes each week, just keeps going up and is noticeably above the 2017-19 average.

Other statistics like number of sales completed seem right now to be around that 2017-19 average, except maybe deals which fallen through.

I'd say the whole Mexican standoff thing is still largely ongoing, at least around these parts.

Saw on Reddit a guy complaining who I suspect is rather representative. He is trying to sell his London flat to buy a house outside of it. Not getting lot of views and no offers. He is fully aware of how much harder it is to get a big enough mortgage but he has reached the point where he is unable to further decrease his asking price, because he is unable to make the house sellers budge on theirs, so if he decreases his sale price further he won't have enough to buy something that is worth selling his flat for.

I imagine this will break to the downside as there's going to be a slow but constant trickle of people having to sell (divorce, death, remortgage looming) will bring the average price down and make the penny drop for other people as well to understand no they won't get something better if they hold out, but it sure is painfully slow.

[Tamas]

Escalating turbulence in Britain's mortgage market as banks hike rates
The turbulence in the UK's mortgage market is escalating as lenders lift the rates on their loans, putting a squeeze on households looking to remortgage this year.

The jump in wholesale borrowing costs, as the City anticipates the Bank of England will continue to lift Base Rate this year, is causing ructions across the market.

On Friday, TSB withdrew its 10-year fixed mortgages with just a couple of hours notice, and also lifted its two and five-year fixed rates by as much as 0.8 per cent, Mortgage Solutions reports.

According to The Times today, the country's third- largest lender, Santander, made changes over the weekend, while Coventry Building Society is expected to increase all its two, three and five-year deals tomorrow.

"Santander, made changes over the weekend & TSB withdrew all its 10y fixed-rate deals on Frid with just 2.5 hours' notice.
Coventry Building Society will inc all its 2,3 & 5y deals tomorrow.
Other lenders have all increased fixed-rate deals by up to 0.85% points" @thetimes

[crazy canuck]

Just for fun I looked up Edmonton housing prices.

As you can see there was a pretty steep increase from 2000 to 2008, with prices roughly tripling in that time.

But really prices have been remarkably stable ever since.  I know I bought my house in 2011 and it's worth about the same now as when I bought it.  There was a bit of an upward blip the last couple of years (almost certainly covid-related) but that's come down again.

Is it because Alberta's economy has been steady, but no big oil booms over the last dozen years?  Or because we're still pretty good at building houses (Edmonton is in the middle of the prairie and lots of available land still)?  Because I know if you look at other major cities in Canada prices have been steadily increasing this entire time.

My guess is that the same graph for Vancouver would be a steep dip in 08 with increases year over year after 2009.  I would also guess that is because Vancouver has been infamous for the amount of time it takes to get new developments approved and, significantly, for the developers who could afford to do so, it made sense to keep land back for future development. 

In a relatively stable price environment it does not make much economic sense for developers to hold onto undeveloped land.

[Barrister]

Couldn't find an exact match, but this one is pretty close and prepared by the same people (CREA) so it's mostly doing an apples-to-apples comparison.  Unfortunately this one only goes back 10 years.

[crazy canuck]

Thanks