And all the other reposessions on my street.

Some delboy type bought a whole string of houses in the development and they’ve all been repossessed and are being sold off dirt cheap. So prices are gonna be really depressed until they go! Come on, they are lovely!

Sitting in your front yard, drinking lemonade….

😈

where is it? in cardiff i’ll buy one!!!!

Pontprennau.

£180k, and we paid £250k!

Leave it 6 months and they will be £120k…

😉

lets club up and buy one between us all?

I am going to buy it molgrips, and do intervals up and down the street… you floppy legged big girl. 😉

It’s been done! Only long enough for a 30 second PC effort tho 🙂

So are you a coach or something MTT?

How can any house in the third world be worth so much?

😆

How can any house in the third world be worth so much?

Who knows? Someone gave the local troglodytes a bit of money apparently.

Third World….cheeky sod! Wales is Gods own country….bring on global warming…lets see what happens to my house price when London dissapears!… I like living up a mountain!

I’m sure they will be snapped up by the local housing association before too long

Clicky

“Gods own country”

I thought that was Israel.

He gave his chosen people the only country in the middle east with no oil…

Nah coal was more useful…and easier to nick….nobody knew what to do with oil until fairly recently!…plus sands a bugger to cycle on….pretty sure he knew what he was doing!

Just need him to keep an eye on the lads on friday night now!…fingers crossed

God’s wettest country surely 🙂

wwaswas – Member

“Gods own country”

I thought that was Israel.

He gave his chosen people the only country in the middle east with no oil…

there’s oil, they just don’t want to share it yet 😆

can I blame the born again Christians yet?

Wales is not the wettest country. Not the most mountainous one either, or the most forested, coldest, hottest, driest, biggest, smallest, most populated, least populated, richest or poorest country.

In fact, it is just right 🙂

I thought Wales was a principality as Prince of Wales, not a country at all.

Wales is known for not being special at anything…even NZ beats it on the sheep/person ratio….

Actually, I like Wales and would live there if there was a nice job for me.

I thought Wales was a principality as Prince of Wales, not a country at all.

Well it’s of indistinct status really. Slightly autonomous sub-region of the UK innit. Country is a shorthand 🙂

Genuinely special things about Wales off the top of my head:

One of the oldest European languages both spoken and written – it has varied very little in a thousand years
Some of the highest sea cliffs in Britain
The world’s first ever package tour was to Caernarfon
It’s a very good place for ancient history
It’s also one of the best places to see a lot of Mediaeval military castles
It’s excellent for mountain biking.. in terms of how close anywhere in the country is to a great trail.

Everybody knows that Yorkshire is God’s own country, pffft…

Yorkshire? Full of miserable gits, bad drivers and grim towns? Sure. Still, if God was from Yorkshire it’d explain a few things.

I saw a guy burning a old shell suit on an old pallet out the back of his house in afan once – that sight pretty much sums up Wales for me.

It’s not really a question of how nice or otherwise Wales is. Fact is that £250k represents something in the region of TEN TIMES the average national salary or FIVE TIMES that if you count a double income. It’s a question of affordability, which we are now all learning to our cost, has been grossly exagerated over the last 10 years.

No offence to Wales or any other part of the country but I can’t see what sort of work it is that people do that pays them the kind of salary that makes £250k for a house affordable. I mean there are only so many doctors, lawyers and accountants that a place needs.

You’d need a sngle/combined income of something in the region of £60,000 to make a mortgage of £225k affordable. That means less than 4% of the population on an individual basis and around 8% on a joint basis could afford to buy that house.

Go figure

But people are trading off the massive increase that their previous property has made. Also if you have two single people getting together then that equity is even larger. It is easily achievable for a 30YO to have bought a property early and made a huge profit then put the equity to a new property and taken a max mortgage.
Its not right but its one way that fueled the massive increases, as long as there were people to buy the cheaper property.

What’s your point geetee? That I make good money? Or that I live in a desirable area?

The houses are priced such that people will buy them. And they pretty much did. One landlord had his houses repossessed when he took the piss and bought 6 or 8. Still 50 or so other houses in the area with people living in them.

Are you telling me I was wrong to buy an expensive house?

YES,IF YOU ARE LOSEING 70K

geetee is right.
they will probably go to housing association problem tenants.
so you end up living in a ghetto in a flat with negative equity that you can’t sell.

just give the keys to the bank and walk away.

shout fail…

😉

YES,IF YOU ARE LOSEING 70K

What’s your point? Should I somehow have known there was going to be a humungous crash? I’d have lost money if I’d have bought any house.

Everyone’s house is down in value. Are they all wrong too?

Molgrips I think you’re making an important point and I do agree with it. What is the point I am making? It is this:

Everyone should have seen a crash coming. I’d been predicting among my friends and many people I know had been predicting it. It wasn’t hard to see coming when average house prices are 10 to 15 times what the average person earns.

The abiity to buy using equity from an over inflated asset is great for as long as that asset remains over inflated, but ultimately, it’s a pack of cards and simple human behaviour demands it be corrected at some point. It is the main reason why pyramid selling schemes are illegal.

What’s going to happen when the baby boomers shuffle of this mortal coil and we all inherit their houses and there are less of us than them? This will flood the market with more homes than there is demand.

We all need a place to live and frankly as long as the house you own and live in is primarily your house and home and NOT and investment, then frankly who really cares if it’s now worth £70k less than when you bought it?

Unless of course you’re in negative equity and need to remortgage and no one will lend to you, so you pay the SVR, which in some instances may represent a significant increase in your monthly costs, which were already maxed out.

You may well earn good money and be in the top 5% of earners in the UK, but it’s little consolation if no one else can afford your overpriced asset and your neighbourhood goes to rat sh*t as a result. I doubt that that would happen, but there is always the risk.

If it’s any consolation I made the same mistake as everyone else because I needed a place to live and bought a place that now no one wants and having met and married the love of my life and relocated, I am now forced into being a landlord in negative equity.

In the economic long run, house prices will bounce back; we are after all and island, one of the most densely populated countries in the world and we have a shortage in housing stock, so house prices will almost always be stable long term.

In the economic long run, we’re all dead (was it Keynes who said this?) Let’s hope that we can realise our dreams before that happens.

I wish everyone the best of luck for the future.

information about historical wage increases, income multiples, interest rates, house prices and past property boom/busts is freely available.
one look at this graph towards the end of last year would have given anyone a good idea of what was likely to happen. (unless they believed the property porn programs on tv more than real economic data)

Geetee….you missed out the fact the population is increasing too….which in itself will increase demand as supply struggles to keep pace!

As for losing 70k…it’s academic if you are staying put…or trading up to a bigger place as their loss is in your favour.

Remortgaging isn’t a particular issue either as people coming to the end of fixed deals are saving money by staying on their lenders standard rate

And Prices are low for First time buyers….they will be ok when banks start lending again….the biggest issue!

Chin up mate it’s not all doom and gloom!

Everyone should have seen a crash coming

Not really. A slow price decline, stabilisation of prices, a slowing of growth – all those things were possibilities. Underlying supply is still low, so once credit frees up it all go back to normal again. We just don’t know. I hate this ‘oh I was right I’m so f*cking clever’ stuff. Some folks were right through luck. And that graph means nothing. What has happened before doesn’t necessarily have a bearing on what happens hence. Each time there’s a big crash the situation’s different. Oh and FWIW in places like Japan, house prices are still really high (more so than here) compared to earnings, despite having had crashes.

who really cares if it’s now worth £70k less than when you bought it?

I do. If I could have sold it and made some money that I could use, I would have done. That was the plan, more or less. But that’s fine, investments can backfire and I took that risk. That wasn’t really the point of the thread.

I was amazed that a recession or major slowing of the market didnt happen sooner. I held off buying for a year thinking that the drop was coming. I bit the bullit and bought in 2005 and it still kept going up for another 3 years.
my point is that those who were predicting it were either coincidental/lucky or had been saying it for a long time. Prices may still have been going if northern rock hadn’t got into trouble and America hadn’t crashed and if the ritish banks hadn’t over extended themselves and we hadn’t bought all the houses at the price people (agents) were expecting and people kept spending and the governent……….

you see my point?

I cant believe molgrips would want anyone off here living next door, it must be becoming a really crappy area!

you see my point?

Yeah – you’re smug.

Loads of people said ‘oh there’ll be a crash’ but people are always coming out with that stuff. More people said ‘it’ll be a stabilisation or gradual slowdown’ which seemed to make sense. Very few people involved with the business of lending predicted a sudden collapse, AFAIK. Some did, but the thing is you get loads of people saying loads of different things all the time – how is a layman supposed to know what to believe?

I don’t pretend to be an expert in global economics. Being right once wouldn’t make me into one…