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There is an obvious ripple effect here which your comment ignores. Oligarchs buy in Knightsbridge, pushing aristocrats to Notting Hill. That pushes the internat

by esja 12y ago

There is an obvious ripple effect here which your comment ignores. Oligarchs buy in Knightsbridge, pushing aristocrats to Notting Hill. That pushes the international managerial types to places like Chiswick, which pushes the mere professionals to Ealing. And so on. If the oligarchs disappear, everyone moves in one slot, and this woman gets to live in a decent but modest home instead of a slum.

notahacker 12y ago
Someone paying £280/month to live in a boat is playing in a different market from the professionals and families looking to buy though. People looking to rent by the room aren't necessarily worse off from the investment bubble if families are priced into the Home Counties and ordinary four-bedroom houses tend instead to be owned by absentee landlords anticipating far too much in the way of capital gains to be worried about maximizing rental yields (but not quite enough to consider leaving the properties empty) Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of ratcheting capital gains tax on properties owned by parties not tax-resident in the UK up to >90%, but the dynamics of how it'll all play out in the housing market aren't straightforward and euthanising the rentiers might actually make low-end rentals harder to come buy - social housing is really the only solution to that.
- esja 12y ago
  There is no "different market" though. It's all one market for occupation of land, and one of the least regulated in the world... a place where speculators compete with residents, where locals compete with foreigners, Panama-registered limited companies compete with PAYE earners, and so on. That is a huge part of the problem.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    The property speculators don't compete to occupy land though. They purchase it from existing occupants - a group whose net movement is out of London altogether - and then compete to supply it to renters. The separation between the rental-by-the-room and the market to buy freeholds is well illustrated by the tendency of an influx of property speculators to increase supply in the former at the same time as they unambiguously decrease it in the latter.

by esja 12y ago

notahacker 12y ago

Someone paying £280/month to live in a boat is playing in a different market from the professionals and families looking to buy though. People looking to rent by the room aren't necessarily worse off from the investment bubble if families are priced into the Home Counties and ordinary four-bedroom houses tend instead to be owned by absentee landlords anticipating far too much in the way of capital gains to be worried about maximizing rental yields (but not quite enough to consider leaving the properties empty) Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of ratcheting capital gains tax on properties owned by parties not tax-resident in the UK up to >90%, but the dynamics of how it'll all play out in the housing market aren't straightforward and euthanising the rentiers might actually make low-end rentals harder to come buy - social housing is really the only solution to that.

esja 12y ago
There is no "different market" though. It's all one market for occupation of land, and one of the least regulated in the world... a place where speculators compete with residents, where locals compete with foreigners, Panama-registered limited companies compete with PAYE earners, and so on. That is a huge part of the problem.
- notahacker 12y ago
  The property speculators don't compete to occupy land though. They purchase it from existing occupants - a group whose net movement is out of London altogether - and then compete to supply it to renters. The separation between the rental-by-the-room and the market to buy freeholds is well illustrated by the tendency of an influx of property speculators to increase supply in the former at the same time as they unambiguously decrease it in the latter.