Wrong yet again diebitter:

To give an insight into the current housing market - my brothers and I are selling my parents's house in order to fund my mum's care. My dad died a few years ago.

We have put the house on the market, guide price £850k, estate agent view it'll go for £800k-£825k. It needs a lot of work, it is a semi in Harrow (outskirts of London). It is near to some decent schools and not an unpleasant road.

We got a bid of £850k within a week of it going on the market. But that isn't really the shocking thing. Most of the bidders (around £800k, one was a mortgage adviser, so I assume he knew what he was doing) were putting down deposits of less than £150k - not that the LTV is that bad, but the affordability in terms of the salaries I assume these people earn is ****.

I find it insane that the banks are prepared to do this in such a frothy market. The way which property lending works (banks loan against property, prices go up, this is good we can loan more to finance property, prices go up, this is good we can loan more to finance property etc. - a cycle that also works in reverse) needs looking at here.

Banks can socialise the risks.

Possibly they have other houses to provide collateral. Tons of investors out there.

This is pretty eyewatering. We went down to Brighton a few weeks ago to visit friends. They were pointing at similar properties to the one you are selling and saying they had gone from ~400K pre pandemic to 600k post pandemic.

Not surprising WFH class are dumping their London homes at those prices to go live on the coast. In fact, here are the number to back this up.



This may be true, but a good estate agent will vet buyers for this kind of information so the seller can make a better quality decision.

For the house we just bought, we were outbid, but the seller went with us, presumably because we were a better overall purchaser.

London houses can only be dumped for so long, at some point equilibrium will occur and living in London wont mean you can sell your house there and print 5 houses somewhere else.

House prices in Cornwall are highly correlated with London prices with a lag, so once the initial flight to niceness is over and much of the office space in London is repurposed to housing, Its reasonable to hypothesis London turning into a drag on house prices rather than the nuclear fuel that has fed regional increases for the last 17 years.

Do may sellers even care if the buyer is buying to let? Yes they sometimes dont take the highest bid but that's usually because of concerns like the highest bidder being in a chain or not having an agreed mortgage.

In any case a decent chunk of new mortgages are buy to let. There will also be what is effectively the same, where it's a residential mortages but the purchaser is renting out their previous home. Typically when they have lived in london a long time, have lots of equity collateral and a strong rental market.

I personally would, as knowing nothing else about the buyer I know they likely have a higher deposit as BtL mortgages typically require 25% deposit, and other things you might assume such as a a better than average credit history.

There's a fairly long-term effect of Home Counties constituencies getting more Labour as affluent younger voters are priced out of London and able to telework. Though said voters are still going to get more Tory as they get older, and indeed the age at which voters switch from Labour to Tory is dropping all the time, so the effect may be temporary.

That might change if we have a period of left wing government. The youth tends to a bit of a counter culture.

I duly noted that a horse show is more important to Her Majesty that the state opening of parliament.

No, the State Opening is more important, so she's more concerned about looking feeble and creaky at the State Opening when she's meant to personify the law.

I dont get the interest in a load of performing dumb beasts. Maybe that's why she went to the horse show instead

Ba dum

She likes horses. And the show was in Windsor, where she lives, so she didn't have to go up to London, and if you look at the Parliament website and take the virtual tour you'll observe that, from the Sovereign's Entrance at the base of the Victoria Tower, there's a considerable staircase to go up to reach the Norman Porch and the Robing Room. And then, wearing heavy robes, the Sovereign has to slog in procession through the enormous Royal Gallery under hundreds of eyes (about 600 invited guests usually sit there on specially fitted benches), go through the long wait while Black Rod gets the door shut in his or her face, then wait for the Commons to turn up, then make the speech, then slog back through the Gallery wearing the heavy robes, then return to the Palace by carriage, all without showing any undignified sign of frailty while representing the Crown-in-Parliament, which is the supreme power.

The Queen is 96. If you have any elderly relatives still living you should get the picture.

I wouldn't have said that Parliamentarians were dumb beasts. They tend to be chancers.

She prefers horse show to horse ****.

In other news...

Now adding “Looking at holes in the ground that are named after Oneself” to the list of things that are more important than the State Opening of Parliament

I shouldn't wonder. Come to think of it she was still riding a horse every day till a few months ago, but she's frailer now.

Free enterprise. It's what Margaret would have wanted. The guy's even wearing 1980s Big Bang City-spiv braces, although they should strictly be red.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61487215

Seems they're still holding him in custody tonight. When you think what the police allowed Cyril Smith and one or two others to get away with, things are looking up a bit. That particular workplace could do with a cleanup, a culture change and an end to 'Don't you know who I am?'

Maybe that guy was the sexist of the year.

Andrew Rosindell, MP for Romford, is getting a lot of attention.

Mark Francois, MP for a neighbouring Essex constituency was getting a lot of attention when another Tory MP was arrested for rape and sexual assaults in 2020.

Both areas Brexit strongholds, and not a great surprise to see toxic masculinity aligned with glorification (and lamentation of loss) of Empire.

It's a rerun of the 1970s but with little union power and low unemployment and low wages, the realisation of exactly the situation the Tories aimed for back then.

Sit back and marvel as Britain's economy roars into action now.

What's the replacement for North Sea Oil this time?

North Sea oil revenues were used up in mainly paying people's dole and 80's tax cuts for higher earners. Unemployment is much lower now, so no replacement is necessary.

Unleash the Brexit UK tiger and watch in awe!