Friday 20 September 2013

Home-Owner-Ism compared

While looking through some articles on the web, I came across this little paper; a conference submission from 2007 on: "HOUSING CONSUMPTION AND RISK SOCIETIES: HOMEOWNERSHIP AS A MEDIATOR OF RISK IN BRITAIN, JAPAN AND THE NETHERLANDS".

Not really that juicy, but the extract of some of the responses from the different countries speaks for itself:

6.2 GOOD INVESTMENT OR SECURE ASSET

I: Do you think this house has been a good investment?

M: I don’t think so at all. We knew at the time we bought this place that the prices were going down.

I don’t really expect them to recover too much either, but it is quite important to maximize the performance of this house. You might feel that it is better to own a house than renting even though the value has gone down
(Japan, home-owner, male, 37).

It all happened by chance, not that we thought beforehand that we could make a killing by selling. In fact, you weren’t at all sure whether buying the house on Parklaan was a good idea, or if the price we paid wasn’t too high. Looking back, it turned out to be a good decision, but that...

Not speculating at all. No, it all happened to pass off very well, not as we expected. We couldn’t have anticipated it. I didn’t realise that the market would...Well, it just exploded. We sold at the right time.
(The Netherlands, home-owner, male, 59)

I think it is the only possible way of making decent money in the long-term, there are no get-rich schemes, you can’t do that, the stock market is not worth investing in, pension schemes aren’t worth you putting your money...

And also you can buy properties with other people’s money, whereas if you invest in stocks or shares or in a pension scheme every single penny has to be your own money, but if you are buying an asset like property you can borrow up to 85% of the cost and in ten years time when it has doubled in value, that’s all yours, so your money is worth 11 times what it was worth 10 years ago...And in the meantime someone else services the debt.
(UK, home-owner, male, 33)

3 comments:

Rich Tee said...

I am so ashamed to be British nowadays.

Rich Tee said...

It's not true that you can't make money out of the stock market anyway. You just have to (1) do research to make sure you understand what you are investing in (2) be prepared to take a few calculated risks and ride out the consequences and (3) actually keep an eye on you investments and make decisions on them at regular intervals.

In the internet age all that is easier than ever before, but still too much effort for the average Briton, it seems.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Jeez that's depressing, but very true. Which makes it even more depressing.