Tag Archives: house prices

Opinion: The raging south east property boom must be stopped, without harming the rest of the UK

By Gareth Wilson | Mon 23rd December 2013 - 12:03 pm

Vince Cable speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show today warned of a ‘raging housing boom’ in the South East where large parts of London could end up inhabited by only ‘foreigners and bankers’ (boroughs such as Camden, Haringey, Hammersmith and Fulham already have an average house price to earnings ratio of over 11).

One solution would be to raise interest rates making borrowing less affordable. But as Vince said today:
“The danger of raising interest rates is that you hit those parts of the country which are not yet fully recovered, you push up the exchange rate …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged land value tax | 30 Comments

What’s going to happen to UK property prices?

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 9:20 am

Here’s a bit of historical context: in the last major house price slump, prices peaked in the third quarter of 1989*, hit bottom in the first quarter of 1993 when they were 20% lower and did not rise back above the pre-slump peak again until the first quarter of 1998.

What would similar timescales mean for us this time round? Prices peaked in the third quarter of 2007, so that would mean them not hitting bottom until the first quarter of 2011 and not getting back to their pre-slump levels until the first quarter of 2016. In other words, not only …