“Everyone wants to hear that their home is increasing in value,” says today’s Bristol Post, “but owners in parts of east Bristol ought to be jumping for joy at the latest figures, which show whopping increases of almost 30%.” I think that should read everyone but me.
If you have children or simply have any kind of sympathy with other people’s children who are trying and failing to get on the property ladder, then what on earth is there to celebrate? We bought our house for one simple reason: we wanted to live in it. We did not buy it in order to make money. What would we do if we sold it? Live in a tent?
The Bristol Post used to sell itself with the slogan, “The paper all Bristol asked for and helped to create”. That may have been the case back in 1932 but it isn’t now. And with ‘stories’ like that, is it any wonder?
The story was written by ‘The Bristol Post’ which suggests it was a collaborative effort or perhaps the actual hack was too embarrassed to put her/his name to it. The rest of the article expands a little, informing us that house prices in Greenbank have risen by 29% and in Patchway they have stood still, but without, of course, explaining why. This isn’t journalism: this is finding a bunch of meaningless statistics and making something up. The Mail and the Sun awaits the author.
I would suggest that at a time when inflation is close to zero, this kind of increase in house prices – the 29% being ‘enjoyed’ by the good citizens of Greenbank, not those in Patchway whose houses are not increasing in value – is unsustainable and may just be an indication that the so called growth in the economy is being stoked by debt and you know what eventually happens when an economy is stoked by debt. It ends in a crash, people start losing their homes, others are plunged into negative equity and no one can get a mortgage at all.
I would like to see house prices fall a little, maybe a lot. Speculators will see things rather different because they buy houses to make money. The only people I care about in the housing market are those who buy a house in order to live in it. That’s why I am not “jumping for joy” as the Post suggests I am. Far from it.
