Where are all the TV property pundits these days?
House prices are plummeting. Whether it’s a heavy correction or a crash depends on perspective, yet either way the bubble is over. While most newspapers report this as a nightmare with shock “HOUSE PRICE CRASH 10% IN A YEAR” type headlines, I don’t believe it’s a wholesale negative.
While those who’ve bought property in the last couple of years are going to find it tough, for others, falling prices mean they’re going to be able to get on the housing ladder at some stage in the future. In fact, when polled just a few months ago more people wanted prices to drop than to rise (see House prices, should they rise or fall? poll results).
I once took part in a debate in front of a group of economists; when the issue of house price rises came up, one reported that when he’d told people in Germany about it, many said “oh dear, that’s awful for them”. After all, this is price rises we’re talking about; they mean things get more expensive.
It’s interesting that to help people get on the housing ladder Messrs Brown and Darling have chosen to get rid of stamp duty (albeit for a small group) to try and ‘boost the market’. Surely if you want people to get on the housing ladder the best thing to do is let house prices fall to a realistic level.
It was all predictable, so why wasn’t it predicted?
The price drops aren’t unexpected, only the timing was difficult to pick. I remember causing a stir on Vine (BBC Radio 2) about a year ago, saying “there’s going to be a house price crash”, but then explaining “these things are cyclical, there’ll definitely be a crash, I just don’t know whether it’ll be in one year, two, five, ten or twenty.”
Yet house price decline was a dirty phrase on most TV property programmes. I call them property porn as so many people were lustfully encouraged into the idea of bricks and mortar as an unloseable investment.
As I wrote back in 2006 (see my a nation hypnotised by property porn blog), many of the basic tenets about property that many took as home truths were simply not correct.
It’s interesting to note that those property experts don’t seem to be around now. Is this because those programmes aren’t as sexy now, or just that its tough to work out what to say…
