Date published: 2008/02/26
The BBC says:
Today's buy-to-let mortgage figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders suggest a booming market.
That was the case for much of last year but looking forward, things are starting to look rather more shaky.
Finding tenants is apparently no more difficult than before in most of our towns and cities.
For investors hoping to sell their properties, however, there could be a struggle ahead as a glut of newly built flats drives down rents and prices.
Apartment blocks sprang up as developers tried to meet the demand from buy-to-let.
Back in 1997, just 16% of new housing projects were accounted for by flats and maisonettes.
A decade later, last year, that figure had shot up to 46% of all new residential building work.
The figures for the percentage of flats amongst new-build housing says it all. England was/is manifestly building way too many flats, and that sector of the market will get hit harder than most.
It's hard to know who is more to blame for the situation, developers or the government (including town planners). The government, egged on by the hysterical anti-suburban urban planning elite, decided that the peasants should live in high-density housing because it was more "sustainable" (and of course the peasants should not be able to live where and how they want to live). And the government, egged on by the academic middle class, refused to allow enough land to be used for housing, so this added to the need to stuff more and more on less and less. And the developors, egged on by the buy-to-let market, were happy to play along because they could make sack loads of money building this way, at least for awhile until the pyramid scheme caught up with everyone.
Funnily enough, much less than 46% of the population wants to live in flats. And in Cambridge, for example, you can buy an oldish house for what they charge for most of the new flats, so for most people it's a no-brainer. So the market for flats is now rather soft.
Of course the BBC, being part of the ruling elite that helped get us into this mess in the first place, has to entirely blame buy-to-let investors for the situation.
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