London House Prices Are Falling, Hurrah!
Or is is hurrah at all? For if London house prices are falling doesn’t that mean lots of people are going to get screwed by their mortgages? And thus we get to one of the great economic problems, there is no way to please everyone.
House prices in parts of London that were once at the epicentre of the UK property boom have fallen as much as 15% over the past year in fresh evidence of the impact of the EU referendum.
Figures from Your Move, one of the UK’s biggest estate agency chains, reveal that the average home in Wandsworth – which includes much of Clapham, Balham and Putney – fell by more than £100,000 in value over the last 12 months.
So, start from what we all would say is the largest housing problem we’ve got in Britain – no one can afford the damn houses. At least no one normal, on a normal income, can afford to buy a house. Therefore we’d really rather like the price of houses to fall.
So, we vote for Brexit, all those foreigners get cold feet about living here and house prices fall, Huzzah!
But we all know what happens next, don’t we? There will now be endless complaints about negative equity, about how people are being bankrupted because their houses are going down in value. Thus we’ll get all the more usual cries that government must do something to keep house prices up.
We could just say this proves you can’t please all the people all the time but that would be trite. We actually want to know what it is that government should be doing about all of this. The answer being nothing. They cannot win, there’s no right thing for them to be doing. Better by far if they simply retreat from the whole sector. Just leaving houses and their prices to the markets and when asked the government can just shrug and insist “Nowt to do with us, is it?”
No, really, what else can they do?
Posted: 19th, March 2018 | In: Money, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
