House prices coming down

[Bruce Everiss]

Here is a website with house price reductions in Harbury (and elsewhere): http://www.propertysnake.co.uk/site/postcode/cv33
Lots of house price information here: http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/

1) 1.4 million fixed term mortgages come up for remortgage this year.
Some just won't get another mortgage.
Most will be paying a lot more.

2) Buy to let landlords squeezed by increased mortgage costs will have no option but to sell large swathes of property.

3) Big redundancies to come in the financial sector. Will have knock on effect throughout economy.

4) UK has highest personal debt in the world. Credit cards and loans leave many with no room to manoevre.

5) Bank of England say credit crunch to get a lot worse.

6) Northern Rock are taking £25 billion out of the housing market.

[Nearly Senile]

Ah, the wonders of an economic bubble, we have seen them so many times before and people never learn because they are driven by greed when prices are going up and fear when prices are going down. The current inept government can take a lot of the blame by making money too cheap and easy to get hold of, especially to people who shouldn't have either been given it or given so much. Now the government are in a hard place with the inflation genie out of the bottle which needs interest rates to go up whilst the housing market is starting to collapse which needs interest rates to go down, if they follow previous golly gosh examples they will go down the populist route and hand the conservatives a broken economy with banana republic inflation. In Harbury we are seeing more and more for sale signs going up but these are wishful thinking because nobody is stupid enough to buy now when they will be able to buy the same house for a third or more less in 18 months or so.I feel sorry for the building trade workers who have been living through golden times, work is drying up very quickly with no new work at all in the private sector, these guys are going to have a very tough two or three years and would be best off lookingfor work abroad because there will be none here as we have seen with many Polish building trade workers going home. Meanwhile there is a recent economic report from ABN AMRO that explains the hows and whys of this and points out quite succinctly just how doomed we all are, don't read it if you are of a nervous disposition.
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/pdf/abn-amro-home-truths-04042007.pdf

[Bruce Everiss]

It's getting worse.
Full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7424309.stm

House prices have recorded their largest monthly fall since 1991, says the Nationwide building society.

Prices have fallen by 2.5% during May, according to its latest monthly survey.

The lender said prices were now 4.4% lower than a year ago, a fall of £8,000 which has taken the average UK house price down to £173,583.

The Nationwide, the UK's second-largest lender, said price falls were now accelerating and had continued for seven months in a row.

[Bruce Everiss]

The Guardian is reporting expert predictions of a near 50% house price drop.
Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008 ... d=politics

The slide in house prices will continue for at least three years and crush the value of a home by almost 50% in real terms, according to a key index of property price futures. Indications from futures trading on long term property prices shows that the average UK home will recover its current value only in 2017.............

And the BBC is reporting that thousands are already in negative equity.
Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7445324.stm

More than 23,200 people who took out 100% mortgages in the year to 31 March could face negative equity, according to figures obtained by the BBC. Falling house prices mean the amount borrowed could be greater than the value of their properties............

[Bruce Everiss]

Governor of the Bank of England apologises and makes excuses as inflation hits 65% over target: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary ... 080616.pdf
CPI is 3.3% and RPI is 4.3%
Everyone knows that in the real world the cost of living is going up far faster than this.

The inflation genie is out of the bottle and interest rates really should be going up to control it.
It will lead to more industrial disputes as wage increases won't keep up. (You feel sorry for tanker drivers struggling by on just £38K).
Real unemployment (not just the dysfunctional benefits parasites) will rise quickly.

Lots of negative equity and reposessions are inevitable.
Even reposessions aren't selling at auction now.
Last month saw the lowest number of new mortgage approvals since records began.
Large numbers of estate agents are going out of business. (Makes your heart bleed).

The housing market is collapsing in front of our very eyes. Offering 20% below asking for a house now looks very generous.
This is going to get a whole lot worse than it already is, we are just at the beginning.
All down to the financial genius of Gordon Brown.

[Bruce Everiss]

Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7480834.stm

..........The Bank of England said 42,000 homes were approved in May, a 28% fall compared with the previous month and 64% down on a year ago. This is the lowest since the Bank began reporting the figures in 1993 and lower than many analysts' predictions................... "The implications of this is that the market is going to remain pretty weak for some time with a significant downward movement in house prices. We are off the scale. We have never been anywhere near as low as this in activity levels and mortgage approvals."....................

[Bruce Everiss]

Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.j ... tviewedbox
Sobering reading:

"New-build flat prices hammered
Last Updated: 1:02pm BST 02/07/2008
Former new-build flats have seen their prices slashed 45-50 per cent at auction, but many are still failing to sell...................................."

And FT.com:

"UK house prices
Published: July 1 2008 09:31 | Last updated: July 1 2008 19:48

Want ketchup with that? For Kirstie Allsopp, the TV property presenter who once promised to eat her hat if UK house prices crashed, yesterday’s data from Nationwide will make chewy reading. For the first time in the 17-year history of the mortgage lender’s monthly index (which is, incidentally, turning into something of a liability for the building society), house prices have fallen month on month for eight straight months. Even in the early 1990s crash, prices never fell with such conviction.

Average house prices, which started falling year on year in April, are now 7.3 per cent below their October peak and 6.3 per cent lower than a year ago. It is far too soon to look for a bottom. That will only come when activity data, as measured by mortgage approvals, which predict about 70 per cent of house price index movements, start to pick up. This week saw another unexpected plunge to 42,000 in May from 58,000 in April, far below the 70,000 or so needed just to clear the supply of new properties coming on to the market.

Modelling the lagged effect of mortgage approvals, UBS calculates that, by November, house prices will have dropped 17 per cent year on year, a pace of decline twice as brutal as the 8.5 per cent year-on-year fall of October 1992, the worst month of the last downturn. Even though approvals are now the lowest seen since data began in 1986, this is not the nadir. The sharp spike in the two-year swap rate that lenders use to price popular fixed mortgages – back up to 6.25 per cent from about 4.75 per cent in January – suggest approvals and, therefore, house prices are unlikely to stabilise for many months."

[Bruce Everiss]

[Bruce Everiss]

26 for sale houses in CV33 dropped in price http://www.propertysnake.co.uk/site/postcode/cv33

[Bruce Everiss]

House prices fell 1.2% in July, the biggest monthly fall in the seven years of this monitoring.
The average house in Britain is now worth £168,500, a drop of over £2,000 in the month.
As most houses in Harbury are worth a lot more than the average the monthly losses will be correspondingly greater.
So a £300,000 house lost about £4,000 in the month.

Full story here: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home