Struggling to downsize? This might be your problem
Housing as an investment product has clogged up the market and is preventing people from moving.
Apparently it’s not just the young who feel the housing market is ‘broken’ now.
The old are complaining too, even those trying to sell multimillion pound houses in the South East.
The Times tells us these people are struggling because it’s becoming both harder to sell their houses and more expensive to buy city centre flats to downsize to.
However, The Times doesn’t see there’s more to this issue than stamp duty.
There simply aren’t many reasonably-priced city centre flats on the market, as Generation Rent well knows.
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It turns out that if you allow landlords to take out interest-only buy-to-let mortgages they quite like to buy up flats in city centres!
Amazingly, they have no interest in ever selling those flats! You can’t have them!
It turns out that if you sell newbuilds to foreign investors that also produces a wedge of property that never comes back on the market!
And young people’s money goes overseas in rent rather than towards their own housing wealth!
It turns out that if you don’t build more houses the rents go up and young people can’t afford to buy houses!
They can’t afford to buy old people’s houses! Old people then have to take money out of their own houses to help their grandchildren buy houses!
Duh, people!
Maybe runaway house price inflation, interest-only mortgages, NIMBYism and buy-to-let empires weren’t such a good idea after all?
