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The UK has an awkward cycle: housing is expensive, people who want to buy houses want to find something cheap. But once they find a house, they want no more hou
by rich_sasha 5y ago
The UK has an awkward cycle: housing is expensive, people who want to buy houses want to find something cheap. But once they find a house, they want no more houses be built, as they would depreciate the value of their own house.
Incidentally, home owners tend to vote Conservative, whereas renters tend to vote Labour. Labour’s housing policy tends to revolve around cheap rentals (social housing) rather than cheap houses for sale.
- radu_floricica 5y agoLast statistic could just be due to age difference.
- mFixman 5y agoI think a lot of negative issues regarding housing in the UK come from the government charging a stamp duty when buying a property instead of property taxes like almost every other country on Earth. Paying 5% of an entire property price is a steep price in an already expensive market. This is even worse when compared to paying nothing when not selling, which just forces people to stay where they are (specially if the market is more expensive from the last time you moved) and further constrains supply and raises house prices.
- rich_sasha 5y agoOn a 500k house, stamp duty is 2%, and that’s already an expensive house (stamp duty is progressive). So it’s not that big, certainly for a first time buyer away from London (no stamp duty at all on first 125k). Council taxes are effectively based on property price, in a weird kind of way.
- mFixman 5y agoIf you already bought a home then selling it and moving to a new one with the same price is extremely expensive, specially if the housing market increased its prices faster than your salary (which is true for almost all UK homes since the 2008 crisis). Making it expensive for home owners to move constrains supply and raises house prices even more.