Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/11/worst-since-2008.html
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Nice to see there is at least some tiny benefit to brexit, no matter how unintentional it was… 
IMHO, prices here in the SE could drop a flat 50% and they’d still be excessively overpriced…
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Word.
I’ve been saying for 20 years that I can’t understand how house prices keep rising when there is no longer any relation to ordinary people’s income.
Some of it is “creative” new ways of selling the houses, such as shared mortgages, partial leasehold, or 5x salary mortgages, which of course are now biting people in the bum.
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If anything, Brexit is revealing quite brutally how inflated the UK’s sense of worth is, including the value of being in London. I just got a flurry of TOS notices from online services that they are moving from London to Ireland, or Luxembourg. Even if Parliament decides to revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU, the dam is burst.
Blaming the bubble bursting on Brexit is, well, blaming the needle instead of the idiots who pumped too much air into the bubble in the first place.
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I don’t think it was unintended at all. I’m quite sure that a guy like Farage and his supporters understood that Brexit would push rich foreign buyers away and they wanted that to happen. And they’re right. Why should rich Russians etc use London real estate as a piggy bank? That might help some people in the real estate and finance industries but it hurts ordinary Britons who want to, you know, afford to live in the city that has been the capitol of Britain for 2,000 years.
Brexit could have been avoided if Britain’s leadership had taken such issues, along with immigration, more seriously. Instead they showed contempt for their own people’s needs.
Nope. Brexit crew are very happy with rich foreign people stashing their cash in Britain. In fact money laundering is about the only concrete business plan they have (otherwise it’s nebulous “trade deals” with magic unicorns).
And of course the areas that voted most strongly for Brexit were not those with the most immigrants but rather those with the most racists.
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Won’t someone think about the oligarchs. 
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They still have a long way to go, just a couple of days ago I received an advert for a renovated first floor 1 bedroom apartment off the main street of a “sought after surrey town”
385,000 pounds sterling, with no off street parking and a 6000 pound / year communte into london using southern, one of the worst rail companies in the UK
It boggles the mind
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They’re such suckers. It’s the same old story: conservative politicians exploiting their Know-Nothing base’s racism and xenophobia to take power and enact their extreme neoliberal economic policies. Then that same base ends up where they started economically, if not worse (but hey, at least someone’s recognising the importance of their skin colour and ethnicity).
For wealthy investors and corporate types, the omnishambles of the Brexit process equals uncertainty, so of course they’re putting their money elsewhere at the moment. If Brexit goes through and the Tories remain in power as planned, though, the Conservatives’ first order of business will be to effectively declare that the money laundry is open for business, this time with no pesky EU regulations and but with lots of cheap local labour. The oligarchs and criminals and the shadier variety of expat will flood back into the London and market-rate purchase prices and rents will skyrocket past the current merely ridiculous prices again.
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That’s pretty much exactly how I see it.
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Not sure ‘cratering’ is correct. The RCIS actually said indicators are “pointing to a modest fall in house prices at the national level over the next couple of quarters … London and the south-east are the only areas where contributors expect prices to continue falling over the year ahead”.
So that’d be from ludicrous prices to merely ridiculous.
And we’ll still have the dreadful Phil and Kirsty on our televisions every bloody week telling us how Tarquin (a finance director for a blue chip company in the City) and Jocasta (she’s in marketing) with their adorable twins Trixie and Bubblejet are struggling to find anywhere suitable for their growing family for anything less than a million pounds.
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You need at least 350k to buy anything in London now and that’s just a 1 bed place as far out as zone 4. Anything below that is effectively a slum. Sanity left the market years ago. I’m looking at 2 bed flats in Leyton that are £400k, lunacy.
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It’s a shame but what can anyone do? There was a non-binding referendum in which a very slim majority voted to leave the EU without any coherent idea of or consensus on what that might look like,
based on information that has since been shown to wildly inaccurate and which was provided by individuals who have since resigned their positions to avoid any accountability
How could anyone stand in the way of such a strong and irrefutable mandate?
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Attributing that kind of complexity of thought to Farage is…unconventional? Unlikely? Unwarranted based on existing evidence?
London wasn’t capital for 2000 years. You could maybe call it a non-consecutive 1100-ish years, starting in 886, but better would be 1066 when William the Conqueror was crowned king there and made it his center of government.
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In some sense the problem with Britain is that there isn’t enough opportunity in all the other cities and towns.
Everyone in Britain shouldn’t be required to live in London or striking distance by rail, to actually have some kind of economic life.
The regeneration of places like Birmingham, Liverpool (European City of Culture) and Manchester has been significant but there is still a lot of destitution too. Many smaller places are in a much worse state.
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That pricing doesn’t seem too far off from pricing for condos in the outer suburbs of Boston (obviously a much smaller city, but looking a similar distance away).
I’m not saying it is not ridiculous - it’s just not as wildly ridiculous as homes actually in cities, nor as out of line with prices in the rest of the world’s cities.
@Kilkrazy - Also a huge problem in many places, because for a number of reasons, it’s very very hard to make smaller cities economically viable in the current world, and essentially no one’s policies reliably mitigate that.
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