Heading for worst housing market in a decade

[John Rumm]

How about 95K for a one bed flat!

Cheapest property on the books at a Basildon EA:

[John]

Can't be an armpit its too close to the A*****le

(Purfleet locals will tell you in greater detail)

[Stuart Noble]

There are all kinds of advisers earning big bucks for answering that question, but basically you need to give it away and survive another 7 years. You can keep the income, but you have to kiss goodbye to the assets themselves. Given the worries about long term care fees, this is a truly wicked and crafty piece of legislation. If you're giving your house away, your offspring must charge you the market rent for living in it, which probably pushes them into the higher income bracket. Some bits of advice:

1) The big loophole for married couples is the discretionary trust will, whereby you get to use two inheritance tax thresholds instead of one. it pretty well and does the whole thing online for £80. Beware of solicitors charging exorbitant fees for doing the same thing. 2) Keep proper records. The Revenue may well want copies of bank statements for the last 7 years and will assume that all outgoing payments were gifts to your relatives and chargeable at 40%. The onus is on the executor to prove otherwise. 3) The whole probate process isn't difficult and the tax issues are usually pretty cut and dried after the event, so I cannot see the advantage in paying a solicitor 2% (can you believe it?) to do what is essentially dogsbody clerical work.

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[Doctor Evil]

The problem is land being in the hands of a few people and locked up. A situation of free land availability and sensible planning laws, and the free market would have supplied demand and kept prices down to a sensible level.

The UK is a permanent housing crises. It never goes away. There is no need for this in a rich country with a surplus of land.

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[Owain]

The left one.

I'd better not say. Anyway, you might not think it was an armpit. Each to their own, beauty in the eye of the beholder etc. My parents didn't think it was an armpit before they moved.

Owain

[Owain]

Depends how extreme the locals like their buttock lifts.

Owain

[Mary Fisher]

But they moved ...

Mary

[Zak]

Do you have a link to this? The Rightmove website seems a bit hard to navigate.

[Ed Sirett]

I think you are right. However it's going to be bad news for quite a few of the (needlessly larger number of [1]) estate agents who have sprung up in the last few years. Those with a core of professional (surveying) and managing work will of course survive.

[1] It is totally unnecessary to have 20% of the shops being estate agents as can easily be found in quite a few London high streets.

[Mary Fisher]

Are the rest mobile phone shops?

Mary

[Owain]

Someone has to employ spotty young men with brilcreamed hair who haven't the social skills or sartorial panache to make it in the demanding world of fast food operatives.

Owain

[Mike]

You should try Prestbury in Cheshire. 3 estate agents out of about 7 shops I think it is.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. Some are Cafe Latte shops.

[:::Jerry::::]

economy.

Err, no, all it proves is that people prefer storing money in bricks and mortar, rather than Spend Spend Spend as people with your intellect often do and then bleat that they can't afford a house and all the other 'essentials' of modern life [1], although house prices fail and rise people only win or loose when the time comes to cash-in those bricks and morter.

[1] non essentials really, it's just that people think they should expect such things.

So you want an communist style approach to housing, the state says were you can live and what size house you need and how much you can spend (if anything) on owning your own house ? You *can't* control a free market, there will always be locations were people want to live and that will force up prices in those areas, there will always be areas were people don't want to live and that will cause prices to drop in those areas - just because someone calling themselves the 'Deputy Prim Minister' says that X number of housed must be build at location Y doesn't mean anyone will want to live there...

Only if you want grey concrete instead of green countryside....

[Ed Sirett]

Eventually (after a very long while) if markets are stable it would all settle down to a couple of operators in each locality. (They would under cut each other till only a few were around). The commission rates being a fraction of what is currently the 'going' rate.

Until recently just about anyone who sold a house for someone else would earn so much commission that the businesses were able to survive on selling a small fraction of the large number of homes changing hands. As the market cools down so will the total income and I expect to see quite a number of them fold, gracefully or otherwise. My heart bleeds, not.

[Martin Angove]

That's an interesting perspective, but I have to note that here in Caerphilly we have had five estate agents in the town centre for as long as I can remember, and a sixth joined them some 10 years or more ago. Ok, so one of the agents specialises in lettings, but the others have been here for years, certainly since before the last housing crisis.

It's possible that Caerphilly is unusual because agents in the town tend to cover a huge area for sales as the small towns/villages in the valleys rarely have their own agents.

For the record the six at the moment are (from bottom of town up!)

Halifax Brinsons (regional agent I think) Fussells (TEAM) Peter Alan (regional) Darlows (tmxdarlows, the youngest in town) Diamond (the letting agents)

I think that's the lot, though I may have forgotten one or two :-)

Hwyl!

M.

[Ed Sirett]

You need to see the excessive number round here, half a dozen in a high street and then the same again within only a mile.

Where you town is covering a wide area there might be work enough for them, round here there are definitely far too many and some will have to close.