Property prices thread

[Josquius]

Ignore Gateshead on here and look at the England & Wales line.


I thought it curious to see that house prices are actually pretty under control...its just wages that aren't keeping up.

Though yeah, looking at stuff like this on a national scale is dumb, on the other side of the fence you have...



Just randomly stumbled on this site, it has some interesting data.
https://www.plumplot.co.uk/London-house-prices.html

[crazy canuck]

I never thought I would say this, but London looks inexpensive relative to Vancouver.

[Tamas]

Banks and building societies had already begun putting up mortgage interest payments before the Bank of England announced its latest base rate hike to 2.25%, piling more pressure on homebuyers and owners.

For some, the increased charges could add thousands of pounds to their total home loan costs over the next couple of years.

Santander, NatWest and HSBC are among the lenders that have this week increased their mortgage rates for new borrowers – in some cases by as much as 0.8 percentage points.

Other banks and building societies are expected to quickly follow suit and reprice their deals upwards now that the Bank has raised interest rates by 0.5 percentage points – the seventh increase since December.

Even though Bank of England continues to be one of the most modest central banks at this stage (despite facing one of the highest inflation), seems like its starting to have an effect on the mortgage market.

My main thesis is that together with the economic downturn and thus inability for many renters to keep up with the 10% rent increase for example yours truly has accepted from their landlord, this is going to eat away at the profit of many buy-to-let mortgages, making many people sell.

[Josquius]

Buy to let folk have already been jumping ship for a few years no?

Sadly I expect this to be a real monkeys paw outcome.

[Sheilbh]

One for Tamas - really interesting and slightly alarming thread on housing costs:
https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1572975530722627584?s=20&t=DpYH5racZS8lkSE9da-ONA

Key point, basically, if you adjust interest rates for affordability - size of payments to income, other debts etc - then the impact of estimated interest rates are as big as the early 90s recession even though they're substantially lower:


As so often with housing charts - and disappointingly - it feels like the key period when things started to go really wrong was the New Labour government. Not fully sure why or what mistakes were made in that period

[Josquius]

Worth remembering things started going wrong rather globally in that period.
I suspect the root of the problem lies in the 80s,it just took time to really take off.

[Sheilbh]

Worth remembering things started going wrong rather globally in that period.
I suspect the root of the problem lies in the 80s,it just took time to really take off.

Maybe - selling off a lot of housing stock and not replacing it was definitely a problem but I'm not sure why it'd take twenty years to show up. The 80s and early 90s basically seem like, as Brown would've put it, normal Tory boom and bust.

Something shifted in the late 90s, early 00s and moved everything up a level. I think there is something to the financialisation argument - but I'm not sure if there's more because it is really striking:

[Tamas]

With everything that is going on in the UK, I guess the only question left is: will the fall in property prices compensate for the rise interest rates for those like us who wait?

[HVC]

The fall itself, no.  The fall added to people who took out second mortgages to finance rental units and investment properties... maybe. Depends how common that is out that always. Pretty common here. Once those people are underwater supply is going to go up quite a bit. If central banks let interest rates go up that high. Right now these people are compensating by jacking up rental fees, but there's only so much the rental market can bare.

[Syt]

[Valmy]

Illinois is clearly the place to live if you want a house.

[Josquius]

I am surprised the west coast red zone goes so far east.

[HVC]

Probably that's their yearly income sucks, rather then prices being high (by other state standards)

[Syt]

Well, it's income in relation to housing prices. So I assume Tennessee housing prices are significantly lower than NY or California, but their median income is also a lot lower.

[Barrister]

Yeah something seems weird about the massive lack of affordability in Idaho and western Montana.

Is it just recreational properties being purchased by people from outside driving up prices?

That must be it - because there's also a few splotches of deep red in like northern Michigan that again wouldn't otherwise make sense.