Poor, old, Peter Mandelson, now known as 'Lord' doesn't seem to get the housing market right ever. After paying far more millions than might be expected by someone on his wages for a house in Primrose Hill, it may be discouraging for him to see that once again he's in the wrong place and the wrong price bracket at the wrong time.
Property values on houses worth up to £2.5 million fell 22 percent last year. The fall in values, which began in April 2008, will probably reduce prices by 30 percent by the second half of this year. Should he wish to disembarrass himself of it that would be hard too. The number of houses and apartments Knight Frank, the London property agents for the twee-er bits of London, including Regents Park, sold for at least 1 million pounds last year fell 49 percent from 2007's record to 2,746, a level likely to be repeated again this year, the company estimates. (Bloomberg).
It's is a considerable achievement for anyone in that generation to fail to make a lot of money on housing, an activity resembling falling off a log. Confidence in the ability to undertake the more complex activity of investing tax payers' money in failing UK industry is not encouraged.
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6 comments:
Sorry, I still can't afford to live there.
Do I detect a soupçon of shardenfreud?
Own there perhaps, S. Lots to rent affordably. We should overhaul personal taxation, the law, and adjust ourselves to the culture of renting like on the Continent. Ordinary people have been driven over a financial cliff by there being nowhere else to invest money without attracting penal taxes, nowhere to rent but 'social' (otherwise recognised as anti-social) housing; and by institutionalised rachmanism.
We could have had so readily the four plus four year contracts common in Italy, or whatever exists in Germany etc. Property ownership is an English hysteria devised for the benefit of very few and to the near destruction of the economy.
In illuminating the areas in which New Labour has destroyed all the possibilities and hopes with which it came to power in 1997 we have the labours of Hercules. But the chosen failure to establish a stable, private rental ambience is an ideological aggression too far.
AntiC, Had I mentioned Cleveland Square, or Kentish town posing as NW1 and signing multiple mortgage applications without reading them despite declaring what was said was true, or even transfers of property ownership into the names of wives, you would have it.
But it is the unnervingness of all these New Labour leaders and leading cadres taking decisions, repeatedly, in the simplest of circumstances with both utter incompetence and curious surrounding arrangements that strikes home.
My opinion of shardenfreud is that it's a guilty pleasure, but not one to apologise for.
It's a bit like spite, don't you think? So it's unattractive. New Labour is marked out by its spite, particularly at the lowest levels.
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