Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
House prices
Speak to the estate agents, something unprecedented it's happening with the cost of home ownership, especially between wood green tube and ally pally.
It's possible this government may become known as seeing through the largest distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich ever ....
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Abi on
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Personally, I'm just gutted we re-mortgaged six moths ago...
Flats in my road now £375k from £250k three years ago - I've also noticed we have three or four active estate agents touting for business where there was only one agent with an effective monopoly when we moved in.
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Permalink Reply by Cecilia on
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wow, I am only glad we moved when we did - the market seems to have gone bonkers since! and I am talking just over 4 months ago...
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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Yes but this is all artificially created by the government's decision to guarantee mortgage finance above the 75% level. That's what has kick started it all. It's not the market working per se, it's the govt subsidy guarantee scheme.
It allows some people to go in with a smaller deposit in theory. But as we know the housing stock is pretty static so the many people chasing the few properties produces the price surge we're seeing, thereby making the deposit in £s go up anyway. Short fixes in policy like this rarely work but, the govt hopes for a 'feel good factor' leading up to the elections :)
Btw, any future mortgage failures under this scheme are meant to be covered by the insurance type charge to the banks (ie. the banks pay about £1000 per loan to the govt for some lending packages). If the govt charge doesn't cover future mortgage failures (in say the next economic crisis) then we the taxpayer pick it up.
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Yeah, I'm deeply cynical about it as well. It does seem enormously popular (surprisingly so when you look at some of the rates on those mortgages), but I suspect it still mostly benefits the better-off. For example I know a lot of middle-class parents who are now able to give each child a deposit, where before they could not help in this way because that would mean favouring one kid. I had to bite my tongue when a family member complained that they didn't like the way some of the eligible developments had to be in zones where there was social housing...you really can't have everything in a place like London.
I do think it could be good for 'cheaper' areas like ours and the ones around it though, because there is a lot of good 'first time buyer' stock around this area that had been partially out of the reach of that market for years because of the deposit situation. Won't this perhaps lead to a few more buyers actually looking to set up home rather than buy-to-let landlords that were able to run riot before?
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Well Matt the government can just sit back and allow foreigners from low tax countries to buy the properties and let them out for extortionate rents (if they want more than just the capital appreciation) OR they can do this, which is preferable.
And I mean look at the cheek of this government. They're going to make foreigners pay capital gains tax when they sell! Outrageous!
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Buy-to-let landlords have some use in providing the rental properties which a large number of Londoners live in but, they are only there in larger numbers because this country hasn't had a social housing policy in 20 years (well they have but the policy has been to sell council housing thereby reducing the stock of council housing).
For private builds foreigner buyers should only be able to buy if they are going to rent the property out to Londoners and not leave it empty. But here's the problem (as you yourself have already said elsewhere John), 70% of new builds in London are going to those foreign buyers. That's dumb. That doesn't serve Londoners at all and it needs to change. We need a New York mayoral revolution.
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Permalink Reply by Malcolm on
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While it's true that many new builds go to foreigners, it's *also* true that the vast majority of these are buy-to-let.
Since Britons generally don't want to buy new build (and certainly not off-plan), the foreign money is increasing the supply of rentable property in London.
Is that a bad thing in your book?
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If they didn't have this market for 1-3 bed apartments (in Hong Kong with 15% tax) they would be forced to build homes for families. Admittedly on the green belt, something David Lammy is advocating.
I prefer my idea which is actually already being worked on by local property developers. Demolish the medium density housing at the top of the ladder and build high density housing. From 2001 to 2011 the top of the ladder saw a one third increase in population as compared with flat on the rest of the ladder. Young people willing to live in hutches want to live near the tube.
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Permalink Reply by ant on
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How do you know about the one third increase at the top and flat on the rest? Are those stats available publicly somewhere?
If that is the case then it helps support the norther Ladder traffic plans - more residents = more deserving of less through traffic.
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Yes, they're from here.
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Actually, I wrote about this last year here.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Those 95% (effective) mortgages are being set up with the 0.5% base interest rate. When that inevitably goes up over the next several years, the repayment costs will rocket, mass repossessions of unsaleable housing will follow. Given that's what caused the 2008 crash, let's hope those loans are not being divvied up into derivatives and crash all the banks again.
You read it here first...
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