[Chris_Newton]

Spare a thought for those of us who were just about old enough to work and buy a home, but instead decided to invest in starting a business or two. :-(

Even having had some modest success with those businesses, I expect we’d have made considerably more return on the initial capital by now if we’d simply bought almost any cheap property here in Cambridge and traded up over the years since, and we could have done it without all the commitment and hard work that goes into getting a business up and running.

The thing that is most infuriating is that the property market is being artificially propped up again and again, both though schemes that pump more money into the market and through planning restrictions that mean we don’t build anything like enough new homes to meet demand. This is great if you have a small portfolio of buy-to-lets or perhaps if you’ve reached a stage where you want to downsize, but not really for anyone else and certainly not for those who just want to buy (or build) a home for their family to live in instead of as an investment vehicle.

[buserror]

Well a deeper problem is the 'home' thing. I'm an immigrant from France, and I'm always /amazed/ at the fact that everyone want a house No wonder there is property shortage, as most of the space is wasted.

Seriously. Take a parcel, make 5 tiny houses with matching tiny garages... In france on that surface you would have a block perhaps 3 story high of 20 luxury flats with underground garage, electric gates etc.

Sure, it wouldn't be be dream 'detached house' thing, but perhaps it's time for the way british people see their 'home' to evolve with the resources they have...

I know quite a lot of people in France who owns a flat. THEIR flat, and it doesn't feel less like 'home' than the random tiny estate 'semi detached' in ASBOland.

[Chris_Newton]

Maybe you simply make better flats in France. I lived much of my young adult life in rented flats, and they were horrible.

One had such a damp problem that the main bedroom was uninhabitable, but it took months to figure out who was responsible for fixing it and get the required permissions. In reality, I moved out as soon as I could at the end of the initial tenancy period so I never saw that work done.

One was flooded from an upstairs flat where the plumbing failed. We literally had two large police officers trying to break its door down for several minutes to gain access for the emergency plumber before we discovered that the neighbour had been in all along and somehow slept through everything.

In the next one, you couldn’t walk around or talk normally late at night for fear of the downstairs neighbours getting irate at the noise. Don’t even think about turning up the TV, playing a musical instrument, or running a washing machine after 8pm!

It would take a degree of desperation I have never been unlucky enough to experience for me to ever live in a flat again, or a level of build quality and isolation far beyond anything I have ever experienced in any flat I have lived in or visited.

[buserror]

Yes I appreciate that paper-thin walls aren't going to cut it, that's why I mentioned 'luxury' flats....

I lived in quite a few in France, and I remember playing electric guitar, loudly, at 3am in one and the neigbours couldn't hear it!

They did object about the Djembe session tho :-)

[J-dawg]

No wonder the UK has a productivity problem.

[collyw]

Plenty of politicians and their partners own small portfolios of but-to-lets. Pretty corrupt if you ask me.

[Chris_Newton]

To an extent, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. While I don’t think politicians should be making policy that is blatantly to their own advantage without some other justification, I also don’t think they should be mysteriously forbidden from doing reasonable and legal things that other people in a similar situation to their own except for not being politicians could do.

Put another way, my objection in this case is not to those who have successfully invested in property ownership, whether politicians or not; it is to the fact that doing so was a viable option in the first place, because the housing market has been systematically manipulated over many years now to artificially inflate the value of properties. This gives a false sense of security to a lot of people, and for the same reason, it makes it politically difficult to implement policy that will restore some sense of proportionality to house prices, such as significantly loosening planning rules so we can simply build more homes.

That is what needs to change, IMHO. The value of a property can be whatever the market wants it to be, given what the land it’s on is worth and what it costs to build and connect up and so on, but we shouldn’t be forever inflating the market by artificially making property a scarce resource.

[collyw]

"Successfully investing in property ownership in the UK" also means excluding younger generations the chance to own their property (especially if you are in a position to influence the supply side via planning laws), so I am less keen to give them the benefit of the doubt.