Tag Archives: house prices

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

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 | 30 Comments

What’s going to happen to UK property prices?

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 …

Posted in News | Also tagged | 5 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Peter Davies
    There is a general problem that all parties state their targets in terms of new homes built. While regeneration programs replacing bad homes with better ones is...
  • Peter Davies
    As usual, the article talks about a requirement for social homes and "genuinely affordable homes" but a strategy for delivering "affordable homes". We need to b...
  • Tristan Ward
    "The question on Monday evening is whether we should be as wary of it in private hands" Of course we should. We don't like anyone or anything that abuses pow...
  • Pawel Urbanski
    Gareth, thank you for this. Housing is one of the issues raised most often on the doorstep in London, and this is what Lib Dems in action looks like: Richmond, ...
  • David Moon
    We keep obsessing about the National Debt and fiscal rules, when the real weakness of the economy is our trade imbalance with the rest of the world, particularl...