From The Daily Mail:
House prices look set to tumble next year but a shortage of homes on the market should prevent a total collapse in value.
Property values are likely to fall by 2 per cent during the coming months but the lack of supply should help to stabilise the market at some point during the first half of next year, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said. Prices could then begin edging up again during the latter part of the year, to leave property values close to where they started the year by the end of 2011.
1. The Home-Owner-Ists want house prices to go up, fair enough. This makes us collectively poorer, not richer, but like all good Socialist élites, these people want the biggest slice of the pie and don't care how small the pie is.
2. The only possible benefit from rising house prices is if you can sell your home, use part of the money to buy a cheaper one and bank the cash difference. Selling-to-rent is a non-starter, because renting is of course for scum; but being a landlord is seen as A Good Thing. Which is a bit like despising drug addicts but lauding the entrepreneurial skills of drug dealers.
3. The Home-Owner-Ists admit that if enough people sell up, then this will push prices down.
4. Therefore, to maintain the value of your house, the logic goes, you should avoid selling it.
5. Taken to extremes, Home-Owner-Ist logic says they should engage in a seller's strike and never sell a single house again. Ever. In which case, where's the benefit of your house being nominally worth more (to the extent that a price can even be established), if you can't ever sell it?
6. How on earth they can predict that prices will start going up again in six months is beyond me, will that be the impact of falling interest rates or something?
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Home-Owner-Ist Logic Fail
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7 comments:
How on earth they can predict that prices will start going up again in six months is beyond me Thery can't.
How on earth they can predict that prices will start going up again in six months . . ?
Wot Lola says.
It's the non-nautical equivalent of whistling for a wind: a feeble effort to cheer themselves up. OTOH the prediction might be correct but, as you imply, if house prices do increase it won't be caused by a fall in interest rates.
MW - I hope this comment one isn't trapped in your spam filter.
"because renting is of course for scum; but being a landlord is seen as A Good Thing. Which is a bit like despising drug addicts but lauding the entrepreneurial skills of drug dealers".
That is as neat a summation of the policy of successive governments towards "extending social housing for rent" stocks as I have seen. Bravo.
Umbongo, I see your "Wot Lola says" and I raise you a "Wot Lola says without the typo"
L, I didn't think so either.
U, it's not just whistling, in a highly speculative market, sentiment is very important.
Anon, thanks.
SW, the stakes are too high for me, I'm out.
The RICS always feels the need to say *something*. The fact that it's usually rubbish is rendered unimportant by the fact that in 6 months' time either everyone will have forgotten if they called it wrongly, or if chance may have meant they got it right, their gibberish qualifications and barriers to entry will be justified.
Money for old rope.
It is really frightening that the housing market can move as one: stick to some kind of sellers' strike without anybody much breaking ranks.Of course the housing market with hundreds of thousands of ordinary punters is supposed to be the paradigmatic market so can't see the call for the Homeownerists are Socialist jibe .The Tories started the ball rolling by ditching Schedule A ; Labour could hardly say they were anti-house price rises after that.The best you can hope for is silence on house prices and benign neglect in the manner of John Major and ,it now appears, Cameron ( another dog that does n't bark).Wilson began to develop an anti homeowner line of rhetoric but lost it completely about the same time.
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