Thursday 26 June 2014

Outbreak of common sense...

… in London:

Half of Londoners want house prices to fall, an exclusive poll for the Standard reveals today. The startling find marks a historic about-turn in views on the soaring property market, say experts.

With the cost of buying a home rocketing out of the reach of ever more Londoners, almost a third of adults in the capital want property prices to go down “a lot”. A further 18 per cent favour them decreasing “a little”, the YouGov poll found, while just one in six people hopes prices carry on rising. The findings came as the Bank of England unveiled new measures to prevent an explosion of potentially dangerous mortgage debt that could stoke prices even higher.

Tanya Abraham of pollsters YouGov said: “While much has been made of the benefits of a house price boom, many Londoners don’t believe it’s a positive thing. Recently it seems thoughts have turned to the downside — namely, rising values locking many people out of buying a property.”

Home owners are now in a minority in London, with thousands of young “generation rent” workers feeling excluded from the property ladder by ever-rising prices. Those who have bought homes for the first time often find it impossible to move up to the next rung and would like to see prices falling. Younger adults aged 25 to 39, many of whom may be first-time buyers, appear most concerned about startling hikes of around 20 per cent a year in London, with 56 per cent of this group now wanting property prices to fall…

Paula Higgins, chief executive of the HomeOwners Alliance lobby group said: “There has been a fundamental, historic shift in attitudes that I don’t think the Government is aware of yet.

“People who own properties may have made money out of them but they now realise their children and grandchildren won’t have the same opportunities unless the Government stops this boom and bust property cycle.”

7 comments:

benj said...

Except Hackney MP Diane Abbott, who warns that it's a "tax on London".

So it turns out the fake-Capitalist have allies with the fake-Socialists.

Who'd have thought?

A K Haart said...

“...their children and grandchildren won’t have the same opportunities unless the Government stops this boom and bust property cycle.”

That's my worry even up here in the Midlands. Meanwhile we see more and more terraced houses falling into the hands of landlords.

DBC Reed said...

Crikey! Mark Wadsworth's "tongue- in-cheek" party could make electoral inroads in the capital! Rebadged as Cut House Prices Party= CHOPP, it might be that it has had its manifesto written for it by the survey and its attendant hoohah.It might n't be necessary to be too specific about tax changes etc; sounds like statements of intent would be enough.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BJ, yup. The FC's say it's an attack on the wealthy, the FS's say it's an attack on the poor.

AKH, unless we as a society agree that land rents cannot be collected privately - whether by rent+mortgage caps or by LVT - then it is inevitable that land ownership will become more and more concentrated, as we have seen over the last ten or fifteen years.

DBC, for whatever reason, most of our members are in London and South East, which happens to be where we are most needed.

Bayard said...

“...their children and grandchildren won’t have the same opportunities unless the Government stops this boom and bust property cycle.”

Er, wrong. For house prices to go up more than inflation, they have to come down again at some point. That's boom and bust. Without it, prices wouldn't ever go up faster than inflation and no-one would have the "opportunities" to make money for doing nothing. Also, I bet the people who say that they want prices to "fall a lot", only want it so that they can buy and own an asset that makes more money than they do. They only want to stop the train so that they can get on it, then they want it to
get going again. No-one wants it to be shunted into the siding marked "LVT".

Ralph Musgrave said...

"Half of Londoners want house prices to fall." 95% of those people will have voted over the last two decades for the pro-mass immigration parties: Con, Lab and Lib Dem. Which pushes up house prices (particularly in London).

So s*d them: they've got what they voted for - unaffordable housing.

Mark Wadsworth said...

RM, there is unfortunately no evidence to support a correlation between immigration and house prices, but hey...