Category Archives: property

Read about the Marching Morons of the Residential Property Market

The great British property-owning tradition is alive and well under the new Tory housing proposals announced

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One of the major planks of Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation initiatives, during the 80s, was to allow council house tenants to buy their own homes and become part of the ‘great British property-owning society’.  A purchase then for circa £60,000, is today worth circa £6-700,000.  One of the fortunate former tenants now has a nest egg, invariably free of debt, which when sold could buy a smaller property for themselves and release a handsome amount of cash that could provide a quasi-pension for their old age and possibly, in addition, give their offspring a ‘leg up’ by way of a deposit on their homes.

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The Marching Morons* of the Residential Property Market

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Although the mass-suicide of lemmings is disputed (apparently, they’re just following biological urges and can’t always see the edge of a cliff), it would seem that property valuers and analysts are indulging in the same behaviour. The rumour-mill has been cranking out reports that prices in the residential property market will undergo a significant correction of circa 14% after the Spring of 2021.

Is this prescient foresight or doom ‘n’ gloom prognostication? Let’s look at the economic fundamentals.

One side-effect of all this Covid chaos is the growing chasm between residential property consumers and the parlous state of the economy. Continue reading →

Government cutting red tape on the constipated planning process

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I shout ‘Hallelujah!’ about the latest government proposals to circumnavigate the mindless red tape and labyrinthine process of planning procedures, which have held back the housing supply of affordable and private homes to-date.

In the Thatcher era, we built 300,000 new homes and today we barely dribble out 150,000 of the ‘little buggers’ and although Prime Minister May did make some useful soundings about housing supply, Boris is ‘trying’ to get the deal done. Continue reading →