"The housing crisis is already out of control, and no one in politics wants to help"
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"... Prices have risen because the government has been trying to get them to rise. At the end of 2014 the campaigning organisation Priced Out calculated that the government-sponsored Help to Buy programme had helped raise average prices by £46,000 in 18 months – or 27 per cent – resulting in an additional 258,000 renters being priced-out of buying a home as compared to the 31,000 buyers helped by the scheme. Some 3.5 million people who would have normally been able to buy a home are now trapped in private renting.
"In the autumn of 2014 there was little sign of a slowdown in the UK housing market. There were plenty of warnings of a slowdown, but very little evidence of prices falling. By September prices fell slightly in most regions, but they usually do in that month. In London prices had risen by a remarkable 18.4 per cent in just one year. That annual percentage increase had itself been rising all year; but no one can tell you what it will be in a few months from now. It could crash; it could grow even higher; it is unlikely to remain the same. As prices began to fall in central London in February and March of 2015 the latest budget is designed to try to hold them up through to 7 May.
"On 23 October 2014, shares in the London-based estate agents, Foxtons, fell by 20 per cent in just a matter of hours. They fell because Foxtons said that they did not expect to make as much money next year as they had in 2014. Many investors wondered whether this might be signalling the start of a wider property crash. Foxton's fortunes have suffered again very recently and again there is chattering among the informed. Annual price rises of 21 per cent were reported in London last year. Four years of such housing inflation and prices would more than double. Everyone in the business knows it has to come to an end, they just don’t know when."
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