Buying a house

[DominicJ]

If your a cash buyer, then nows probably a bad time, if your a mortgage buyer, nows a good time to get a long term fixed rate.

Or thats what I would do / am doing.

If your a cash buyer buying now, negociate, hard.

[UndercoverElephant]

Now could quite possibly be the worst possible time to buy a house. ever.

Agreed.

What proportion of would-be sales are those hopefuls who now find themselves in negative equity?

Many of them are people who would like to sell, but would either find themselves in negative equity if they lowered the price to a point they could actually sell their property, or they are potential up-sizers wouldn't recover enough equity in order to be able to get the meaty deposit now required for the property they want to buy. So for one reason or another, these people cannot lower their prices. This means there are a lot of properties just sitting on the market going nowhere, but so long as there are a lot of other properties which are similarly overpriced, and so long as interest rates remain around 0%, they will neither lower their prices nor be forced to sell.

The housing market cannot return to normal until first-time buyers can get on the bottom rung. This cannot happen at the moment for two reasons. Firstly, property prices are still ludicrously high by historical standards. But more importantly, general inflation is higher than interest rates, which means that people (I know some) who have been saving for years and now have £30K for a deposit are seeing the real value of their savings go down. Inflation is eating away at their lump sum faster than interest payments are increasing it...so they are currently running to stand still in order to keep their lump sum at the same value whilst property prices remain sky high. With so few first-time buyers able to get on the ladder, the entire property market will remain badly "constipated". On the bright side, this is very bad news for estate agents.

[RenewableCandy]

I like that last sentence

[kenneal - lagger]

Me too! Even though I have some friends who are estate agents. They're only people after all: some good: some bad.

[RenewableCandy]

I bet you wouldn't want your dauhter to marry one, though