Bring on the repossessions

Heh. Never had the pleasure, despite wishing for it a few times.

 

Owner occupation seems to be a particularly British obsession. It can't
all be explained by price. There just seems to be a greater willingness
to rent on the 'continent'. At least in France, I wonder if their system
of inheritance law and tax has a bearing?

--

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
| Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest Yamaha WR250Z |
| Gilera GFR Moto Morini 2C/375 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 

Or maybe the lack of requirement for references and difficulty in evicting
non-paying tenants......?

I'd go for the inheritance law being the stumbling block for older types and
the inability to get rid of undesirables being the bonus for the
don't-give-a-****-just-want-a-free-house types....

Dabe

 

1 bike worth 100 quid, one car worth somewhat less, about 4k of
unsecured debt (clearing rapidly) and my job has me out of the house for
about 12 hours a day, if I'm lucky.

A colleague at work, on similar money to me (I suspect) rents a flat
around Barbican. A couple of years ago the market value was about £275k.
Now it's $900k. That's just stupid.

I did the sums a while back, and it's about 300 quid a month cheaper for
me to rent the flat I'm in now than it would be to buy it, not including
fees, buildings insurance, white goods, etc. We're talking a fairly
small 2 bed flat in a commuter-belt town here, not a 4 bed mansion in St
Johns Wood. More than 300 quid a month now the rates are going up again.
Not to mention that it certainly feels like the top of the market. But
then it's felt like that for the last 5 years, and is anyone a fan of
impending negative equity?

I could afford to buy my current place if I thought it was worth the
money, but it'd be crazy money for what I'd get, and this would just be
a first rung. Conversely, while I'm renting, I'm lining the pockets of
someone who was lucky enough to have the spare income when prices were
substantially lower. Buy-to-let landlords do my fucking nut. No wonder
there's a housing shortage.

 

When all the council estates went pikey

--

 

Woolwich fund management. I took it out in 2004. It give me a good income
plus excellent capital growth
Min investment 100K

 

No I got a few of them and they do not do that well.

 

ogden says...

Help do something about it then

http://www.pricedout.org.uk/

 

Simple i walked into a building society showed them all the pieces of
paper with numbers on from the accountant and they kindly let me have
funds to buy my house

After a while the accountant decided that after looking at all the
numbers on the pieces of paper again that it would be financially
prudent to no longer have a mortgage




--

 

<fx: considers street>

I can only see Enfield Town at one end and Winchmore Hill at the
other...

 

You're on the button there - Thatcher's "Right To Buy" forced the sale
of huge numbers of council houses at prices well below market value to
sitting tenants.

And the above is why there's precious few council houses left now.
What "social housing" housing there is, is owned and managed by
Housing Associations - who are also threatened by RTB legislation.

To answer dwb's point - no, not so many people "owned" (few people own
their place outright, Dan) their houses in previous generations, it is
a trend that has been growing over the past three or four generations
though. However - not many people endured living in Bed and Breakfast
accommodation due to the absence of suitable housing in previous
generations either. The gap has widened.

 

And American, actually.

Same in Germany (well, the willingness), plus it's of course socially
more "acceptable" to rent longer-term than it seems to be over here.

 

Ding with Oak Leaf Cluster.

 

Didn't stop the Tories being re-elected last time, and people at the
time were able to buy houses because they became cheaper.

Me, for one.

 

I do. I use CCs for just about everything (partly for the Air Miles, and
partly for the consumer protection) and pay them off (usually)
punctiliously. But there are times (like Xmas!) when I let a debit
balance ride for a few months.

 

The middle classes did, yes.

Think of the building boom in the early 20th century and especially the
1920s and the 1930s and the extension of consumer credit (mortgages).
IIRC, they built two or three million new homes then, mostly in the SE.
London just exploded outwards.

 

Wicked Uncle Nigel wrote

See now you are confusing the notion that we should all aspire to being
a property owning not so liberal democratic society with a means for
councils to raise more revenue without putting up obvious taxes.
Property ownership has been a part of Britishness, or at least the
aspiration, since the day we first stole Scotland back from the celtic
underclasses.

 

Pip wrote

I think you will find it was a practice started in Little Moscow Down
The Thames some 5 years before and copied by our then illustrious
leaderette.

 

The Older Gentleman wrote

No they didn't, not all of them. Or even most for that matter.

Granted yer upper classes, bless them, were all land-owning gentry as is
right and proper in the eyes of the lord and yer lower classes were all
peasant scum intellectually incapable of grasping the concept of
ownership of property except in as far as they weren't allowed any. Yer
middle classes though owned property much more on the basis of trade
than anything else. Yer middle class who run a factory for example
would prolly rent the land but, in partnership with his lord and master
which was right and proper in the eyes of the lord, would own the
factory buildings and all the serfs and other saleable goods therein.
Or marginal farming land that was not good enough for the likes of the
lord of the manor and his ladies ship on account it was crap but was
more than good enough for gentleman farmers who thought themselves
middle class but were the only ones and who wanted to play at it thjat
was owned by middle class types although it often wasn't long before the
lord of the manor would have the bailiffs in and start the whole process
going again as is right and proper for does not the lord say that
fertile land when well looked after will give a good harvest every year.
Yer other middle classes, the thinkers and the dealers and the movers
and shakers and media personalities and such like would prolly rent a
gaff in town off the agent of the land-owning gentry which again is a
right and proper thing to do in the eyes of the lord. I mean Karl Marx
was middle class and you will find plenty about how he lived his life,
well documented as a renter that boy was and you don't get much more
middle class than revolutionary thinkers with a private income do you?


And then the proles learnt to read and write and some of them got a vote
and this happened:-

 

Champ wrote

#1 Son is quite keen on the idea, it would bring forward his plans to
buy a property in Central London by a year or two.