From The Times:
Taxpayer cash pouring into the housing market under the government’s Help to Buy scheme is creating a bubble that risks leaving a generation of homeowners stuck in negative equity, an investigation by The Times has found.
Analysis of house prices in ten towns and cities across Britain has found that homes available under the scheme cost an average of nearly 15 per cent more per square metre than comparable properties that are not eligible.
Experts say the figures show that housebuilders are using the higher budgets of Help to Buy purchasers to ramp up prices and profits, while young people are being left in overpriced homes that they will struggle to sell.
Taxpayers have pumped more than £8 billion into the Help to Buy scheme...
Friday, 14 September 2018
Well there's a surprise...
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8 comments:
Well. Well. Who'd a thunk it?
Cheez
I was telling people this years ago (in Scotland, at the time) and they wouldn't believe me. Around 2008, a local builder came up with a wizz-bang wheeze to build basically studio apartments, 4 in a block, and sell them 20% off, with a revaluation after 10 years so that the purchaser now owed the builder 20% of the re-assessed value. I built a (if I say so myself) bloody good spreadsheet so people could work out for themselves what sort of a hole full of shite they might end up in, given property price appreciation / depreciation scenarios, interest rate assumptions, and so on. I saved a few from probable financial suicide, anyway.
And of course if you needed to get out before the 10 years - pregnancy, relationship failure, move for job, or just going mad in your shoebox-size apartment, the penalties were nice only for the builder.
I despise these schemes more than I can say. But the politicians that dream them up, much, much more.
Anything the govt touches.
L, everybody?
FT, bloody hell, are schemes like that even legal?
JH, "anything the government subsidises"
MW, yep. They were then and I see nothing that's changed in the interim. The Scottish Government actually sponsored schemes of this sort (and I happen to know for certain that one of the earliest adopters was a man who went on to become an MSP and so benefit hugely from the arrangement at taxpayers' expense).
It's disgraceful. Encouraging people to gamble on a single asset, leveraged strategy. How did that work for people buying Bitcoin at market top on their credit cards?
FT, have the victims set up an action group yet?
In other news, the Pope is a Catholic.
@formertory
That is even worse than HTB.
@L fairfax
There are people who have doubts about the current Pope's catholicness
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