Rocketing house prices...

House prices rising in the U.K.- Fact
Why... well, demand outstripping supply -Fact
What demand... some are people buying to rent, some of these people donot even live in this country and buy with cash so as to rent -Fact. Well here is the bit I do not get, if we are in a country with an ageing population of home owners is it possable that if the balance were to shift (supply outstriping demand) could these same investers dump there investment and we have a crash of mega proportion?

Re: Rocketing house prices...

Relativity should be considered, example, an elderly person paid their mortgage off 10 years ago, their property at the time having a hypothetical value of say £200,000.00, because the property market goes a bit bonkers over that ten year period, the value increases to say £300,000.00, then there is a crash, and today it's worth £200,000.00 again, so what, it's a home after all, not a cash cow.

Edit, such a crash would cripple the Banks, not the Homeowner, Imo.

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If I may extend the topic slightly. There is a nationwide campaign to build more houses of which many people are not yet aware. I only really paid attention when my son started to search for another house and I looked at who was building what and where.
We are to have 26,000 new houses in Worcestershire a proportion of these are to be built on green belt farm land and irrespective of the local infrastructure school /doctors etc.
A block of 800 houses is being built on the outskirts of a small town with access on to a main road which is already excessively congested and is a link road to the M5 motorway, it is also subject to flooding.

I appreciate we need some more houses and a few in each village to help keep alive local communities, but building hundreds of houses on the edge of small towns and villages seems like an ill thought out policy for many reasons.

This action is being quietly replicated up and down the country. Building thousands of houses must surely bring down the prices of houses rising partly due to lack of supply .

I live in a three bedroom semi detached property in a small hamlet and would like to move to a smaller house because half my house isn't used and I am paying needlessly to maintain and heat it.

The problem is the cost of moving to a smaller house will cost me around £8,000 and this will have to come off the price of my next house and I can't find anything comparable to this house for less money.

There must be thousands of elderly people like me who would move if they could afford to.
It seems first time buyers (who receive help with mortgages) and those in social housing (with the 'right to buy' subsidies) are the only ones to have been considered when it comes to receiving help with housing needs .

There must be thousands of elderly people like me who worked hard to buy their own homes but have very few savings and find their homes have become too large but they are not in a position to move. Offering some kind of help to these people would surely ease the housing situation and free up larger homes for growing families.

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There can never be a ¨crash¨ in property prices - too many extra people arriving who need somewhere to live, and plenty of buy-to-let merchants waiting to snap up the new housing as it´s being built. Apart from the occasional adjustment, property will always be in demand, and therefore must increase in value as it has done in my 75 year lifetime. Helping older folk to downsize would be a good idea, but not much of a vote-catcher, so unlikely to be happening soon. After all, we pensioners are amongst the rich these days...

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Up till recently, it was assumed Petrol Costs would never reduce, and in very recent history, a certain country seeking independence had a complete autonomous economy planned on this assumption, close shave if you ask me.

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One of the reason house prices seem to be rising so quickly is the number of decent homes bought by developers or people who do them up as a hobby they buy them cheap and then sell them on when they have modernised them, we found many lovely older homes we could afford and would have loved to live in with a coat of paint to freshen them were snapped up and back on the market less than 3 months later for double the price with all new bathrooms, walls knocked down and big new kitchens.
These people making money and the buy to letters are stopping people getting on the housing ladder or even downsizing by making these entry level homes so expensive.

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Let them get on with it, in the short term all Us home owners are benefitting from the rollout effect

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I'm glad to see house prices rising for the sellers. I lost out on £30,000 on my house valuation, 4 years ago. A lot of money, which I could have done with.

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You may consider the need for more houses with immigration. The more people from abroad that want to live in the UK is bound to put pressure on the housing stock. I am not for one moment saying we should stop immigration but it should be in proportion to how many we can accommodate.

It is totally useless building more houses for foreigners to buy leaving our own people in the same situation as before.

House prices are also linked to cost of living and wages/salaries. The more people earn the more costs go up to pay them and also up go the price of housing. It is a continuous spiral , house prices up- wages go up so people can afford- and so does everything else to pay the wages/salaries

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All valid ressponses and I may not be getting it... but A) its not like cars, lets say 350 new cars are joining our roads each day. Then how come there is not grid-lock? ah thats because 328 cars are taken off the road each day. New house are built but that is adding to the numbers, they are far from replacing ones knocked down. And if they should knock down7 you know that 12 will go in there place. B)Immigration... not all of them are here to stay they are quite a transiant lot. If our ecconomy was to take a dive then who would you expect to be on the first boat out of here. Also I would expect that people born outside of the U.K. V 50 - 70 year old home owners it would be a 20/80 split. I am saying when the 80 shrinks, look out Charley.