In the Weekend Times there was an article, that has been repeated at least once before, about how older homeowners should sell up and downsize to smaller homes to solve the housing crisis 🏠❗️.
I am not sure the person or persons who wrote this article in any way understands property. If you sell a large property, you are likely to buy a smaller property. Net gain in new houses? Nil. In fact, it is worse than that, as most people don’t want large inefficient houses anymore, they want the smaller ones that this journalist is recommending the older homeowners move to.
But this journalist is not the only person not understanding property. George Osbourne was also clueless, but he had the power to be dangerous. He may feature quite a lot in any article I write!
One of his poorly thought-out ideas, was that if he taxed landlords to death, they will all sell up and the property issues will be solved. Landlords obviously are, and have, sold up in their droves, but has it solved the housing situation? Of course not – it has even made it worse given that rents are now inflating faster, probably than at any time in history, exacerbating the cost of living crisis.
What the last 200 years of house price rises and falls in this country shows us, is that supply and demand is not generally the principal trigger for either house price rises or house price falls.
Did the population of homeowners halve in 1990 when house prices did? Of course not. Did the population double when house prices did from 2008 to now? Of Course not. As this is rather an in-depth topic and I promised to keep the articles brief I’ll perhaps save the causes for house price changes for another time.
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De Villiers are members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and RICS Valuers Registration Scheme.
