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Single woman buys narrowboat to get on property ladder


David Mack

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20 hours ago, magnetman said:

 

 

I only did economics at school for a couple of months but it doesn't take a huge leap of understanding to work out what would happen. 

 

Value of property would drop enormously because the market would not be skewed by multiple ownership. 

 

I'm not talking about things being free I am talking about a non biased market. 

 

Food and certain other essentials are subjected to certain controls like avoiding monopolies happening. 

 

Nobody wants their house value to go down so this sort of policy would never be introduced.

 

You would find if houses were half as much as they are to buy and you could only have one of them that far more people would be able to get involved in the scheme of paying to eventually own rather than being forced to pay someone else's mortgage for a house they don't even need. 

 

It's basic economics. Supply and demand. 

 

Don't worry I'm a nobody and my ideas will never be relevant but endless increase in price of property, while it might look good to you if you own property, is a basic negative influence on society. It can never be a positive influence other than in the minds of the short sighted people who think that having more money is the be all and end all of life. 

 

 

 

 

I am afraid that your form of market economics is over-simplistic . Your model relies on there being a fixed market size but the evidence of the past few decades is that social change brings huge shifts in demand. In particular, in the immediate post-war period, there were few single person households, and even fewer single parent families and, at least for a while, divorce was a rarity, often confined to the rich and powerful. We now have far more single and single parent households (I cannot recall actual numbers but I do know that a trawl of official statistics has a figure) and likely a significant unmet demand amongst  wannabe households (when did the term sofa surfing emerge as a reality?).

 

 

 

The number of properties has grown faster than the size of the population but, in parallel, excess demand has risen markedly, if price increases are well-correlated to excess demand. There does not seem to be a limit on the total demand anywhere near for the future so that it is much harder to argue for a particular policy that aims to remove house inflation based on historical patterns. Increase the supply and demand increases as well, keeping prices high. It seems improbable that the scale of second home ownership (omitting BTL) has a significant impact on prices, in comparison with these oth3er changes (again I know that objective stats exist to support this even if I don't have them to hand) Not all second home ownership is fed simply by wealth on its own - another social change has been that of double income households (now the majority) - when we first joined the housing market, mortgage companies would only accept one income (usually required to be male) and some of those partnerships end up with jobs in different places. Living-apart relationships are at a level that they are significant enough to be measured in the stats.

 

At least in the short term, I cannot see a way of ensuring that everyone (effectively) has a decent, if not plush, home which is realistically affordable (Oh, how that term has been abused) that does not involve state mandated income redistribution. It used to be seen as a mark of civilization but at times it seems hard to assert that we still live in a civilised society when 'me' dominates almost all policy making. There was a lot that was not right with the former council house strategy (especially the adoption of large, monoculture, estates) but at least it meant that supply was much more under the control of the government (and hence the electorate - see the Macmillan era) and despite many weaknesses the move to Parker Morris standards meant that the new builds were at a higher standard than many in the private sector. Shifting to Housing Associations was initially not a bad idea but has gradually been undermined, not least by the right-to-buy. The use of building regs instead of PM standards has had serious defects - see Grenfell Tower.

 

Whatever, there is no easy answer - otherwise even a Government minister (or more likely their policy slave) would have found it!

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5 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

I am afraid that your form of market economics is over-simplistic . Your model relies on there being a fixed market size but the evidence of the past few decades is that social change brings huge shifts in demand. In particular, in the immediate post-war period, there were few single person households, and even fewer single parent families and, at least for a while, divorce was a rarity, often confined to the rich and powerful. We now have far more single and single parent households (I cannot recall actual numbers but I do know that a trawl of official statistics has a figure) and likely a significant unmet demand amongst  wannabe households (when did the term sofa surfing emerge as a reality?).

 

 

 

The number of properties has grown faster than the size of the population but, in parallel, excess demand has risen markedly, if price increases are well-correlated to excess demand. There does not seem to be a limit on the total demand anywhere near for the future so that it is much harder to argue for a particular policy that aims to remove house inflation based on historical patterns. Increase the supply and demand increases as well, keeping prices high. It seems improbable that the scale of second home ownership (omitting BTL) has a significant impact on prices, in comparison with these oth3er changes (again I know that objective stats exist to support this even if I don't have them to hand) Not all second home ownership is fed simply by wealth on its own - another social change has been that of double income households (now the majority) - when we first joined the housing market, mortgage companies would only accept one income (usually required to be male) and some of those partnerships end up with jobs in different places. Living-apart relationships are at a level that they are significant enough to be measured in the stats.

 

At least in the short term, I cannot see a way of ensuring that everyone (effectively) has a decent, if not plush, home which is realistically affordable (Oh, how that term has been abused) that does not involve state mandated income redistribution. It used to be seen as a mark of civilization but at times it seems hard to assert that we still live in a civilised society when 'me' dominates almost all policy making. There was a lot that was not right with the former council house strategy (especially the adoption of large, monoculture, estates) but at least it meant that supply was much more under the control of the government (and hence the electorate - see the Macmillan era) and despite many weaknesses the move to Parker Morris standards meant that the new builds were at a higher standard than many in the private sector. Shifting to Housing Associations was initially not a bad idea but has gradually been undermined, not least by the right-to-buy. The use of building regs instead of PM standards has had serious defects - see Grenfell Tower.

 

Whatever, there is no easy answer - otherwise even a Government minister (or more likely their policy slave) would have found it!

 

Second home ownership -- and BTL for AirBnB -- may not be such a big problem for lots of the country, because it's heavily concentrated in tourist areas like Cornwall. In many places like this it has completely destroyed availability for locals who can't find or afford anywhere to live.

 

For the housing market in general the supply problem is huge, but this is partly driven by the fact that property in the UK (and the profits made on it) is lightly taxed in comparison to other investments, which is why houses are often seen as a way to make money. Apart from building more houses, making property much less attractive as an investment would help a lot -- but since this would inevitably hit house prices and the pockets of many people -- both homeowners and landlords -- including many MPs, the chances of this happening are slim... 😞

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Demand (as in would like to own a house) is way above supply, so prices have risen as far as affordability allows. So those on lower incomes have been priced out and most of the better off can still only just afford their mortgage repayments.

The rise in house prices has been driven more than anything else by the availability of finance. In my parent's day only the husband's income was taken into account. Then, as more women joined the workforce, and in higher paid roles, the lenders (then primarily the mutual building societies) added in the wife's income at a lower multiple. By the time I was first seriously looking at buying in 1983 (as a single man), lenders would offer 2.5 to 2.75 times the first income and 1 to 1.5 times the second, and then only to people who had been saving either them for some time who had at least 10% deposit. And those limits capped the amount of money first time buyers could pay, and that in turn capped what those selling to FTBs could afford to pay for their next house, and so the whole market was constrained.

Shortly afterwards, the rules were relaxed, 100% mortgages appeared, lending increased and so did house prices. And with interest rates much lower for most of the last decade and a half than during the 80s and 90s the repayments on the higher amount of debt has been generally been affordable.

People of my generation who got in before about 1984 have done alright. Those who followed struggled and my children's generation, stuck with student loans, far fewer well paid secure jobs and sky-high house prices are f*cked. But the genie has been let out of the bottle and it will be very difficult to recover.

Edited by David Mack
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10 hours ago, doratheexplorer said:

1.  Many Councils would love to build Council house, but they don't have any money to.

2. The rules which allow developers to wriggle out of their commitments are entirely set by the Government.

 

I'm not disagreeing with either of those. In fact they kind of make my point, which is that government should be building all of these houses they keep telling us we need, and promising us we will get.

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10 hours ago, PD1964 said:

Take this “landlord, buy to rent, Socialist/Marxist/Communist/conservative/Liberal/Lab” conversation to the Pub/political section. 

Just take it away. It will never come to any conclusion and is a distraction on a boating forum. Its not what most of us signed up for.

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3 hours ago, Tracy D'arth said:

Just take it away. It will never come to any conclusion and is a distraction on a boating forum. Its not what most of us signed up for.

 

I agree. 

 

The bit that puzzled me is why the woman in the thread title thinks she is now on "the property ladder", having bought a boat. 

 

 

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3 hours ago, MtB said:

 

I agree. 

 

The bit that puzzled me is why the woman in the thread title thinks she is now on "the property ladder", having bought a boat. 

 

 

 

Maybe she doesn't "think" she is on the property ladder. In the short article linked, the headline states this, but the body of the article doesn't.

 

I haven't watched her videos, so it is possible she may confirm what the headline says but, other than that, it is only the writer who thinks that.

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Just now, Richard10002 said:

 

Maybe she doesn't "think" she is on the property ladder. In the short article linked, the headline states this, but the body of the article doesn't.

 

I haven't watched her videos, so it is possible she may confirm what the headline says but, other than that, it is only the writer who thinks that.


yea she says it within the first minute

on the video linked at the start of the thread

 

good luck to her 

 

a lovely boat 

 

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On 06/02/2023 at 10:17, doratheexplorer said:

Evidence please.

 

That was a letter in the Grauniad recently. I'll see if I can find it again.

 

1st Feb from a Tim Worstall, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/31/the-enemy-within-guardian-readers-and-the-1

 

 

Edited by George and Dragon
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1 hour ago, George and Dragon said:

 

That was a letter in the Grauniad recently. I'll see if I can find it again.

 

1st Feb from a Tim Worstall, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/31/the-enemy-within-guardian-readers-and-the-1

 

 

That doesn't support your claim.

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9 minutes ago, George and Dragon said:

 

True, he says one quarter of British households. Which is probably less than one quarter of the population.

That's the first problem.  Average household size is around 2.4.  As a crude measure you could divide the one quarter (25%) by 2.4 which would give around 9%, but that's unlikely to be in any way accurate because it would assume that in any given household, 1 person has all the assets and the others have none, so the real percentage will be a lot lower. 

 

Added to that Mr Worstall is playing rather fast and loose with the figures he quotes and also mixes up different studies done according to different methodologies.  For example, he quotes the ONS as saying the 75th percentile of British households have $1m in assets, but if you actually look at the link provided, it actually says it's the 83rd percentile.

 

Put all these things together and I'd be surprised if the actually proportion of British individuals with assets over $1m is more than 5%.  Of course that's just a guess, unless you are aware of anything more concrete.

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5 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

he quotes the ONS as saying the 75th percentile of British households have $1m in assets, but if you actually look at the link provided, it actually says it's the 83rd percentile.

 

That's going to depend on the exchange rate - the 83rd percentile is assets worth >£1million; US$1million is about £830,000 which is between 78th and 79th percentile. So 20% of UK households may well belong to the global 1%. If we can count households rather than individuals. 

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