| Comment | I really disagree with the opinion lending is any cheap now. The fact that you need to raise a 10-15% deposit to qualify for a mortgage and you can't borrow more than 4.5x your gross income prices out enough people out of the housing market already. I'm not sure pricing out even more people off the housing market by making borrowing even harder is the way to go.
The real place where checks need to be implemented is the bidding over HR bit. As it currently stands, it allows people who have loads of cash sitting there to have a complete free rein on the housing market and for everyone else to just be confronted by frustration after frustration. It allows some people to buy up 20 BTL properties which should theoretically be accessible to first-time buyers according to their valuations. This creates a terrible concentration of property ownership, which is imo what is pushing prices (and rents) up in the end. Any market where there's much more buyers than sellers and where sellers can strategically restrict supply in order to achieve higher profits is an uncompetitive one by definition and as such needs fixing - sooner rather than later. |
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