Keechelus

Ha! Welcome to my hometown, Vancouver, BC.

In the 1990's, I marvelled at stories about London housing, where 400-sq-foot flats sold for £250,000. Umm, now we are there.

Closet-size condo apartments are eagerly snapped up here, in pre-sales a year before construction. CA$ 600,000 is a bargain. Sheesh. (CA$ 1.00 = £ 0.50 today)

If there is any good news, it is that that far-flung suburban housing has cooled a bit in price. 40 miles from the city, a modest older family home is about CA$ 400,000. Still outrageous, and a lifelong burden for a working couple ... and it may be harder to keep.

Our gasoline (petrol) is CA$ 1.35/litre and climbing rapidly. I know that's cheap by UK standards, but too many Canadians have monster SUVs and trucks bought a few years ago. Their daily fuel costs would buy my beer for a week, the saps.

And nope, there's little public transit from the far 'burbs to the jobs here; just car-choked highways.

Pardon a PS, a joke on myself: 10 years ago, Jeannie and I rambled 'round Ireland for three weeks. Petrol everywhere was IRL £ 0.69/litre. We crossed into Northern Ireland, and bought petrol in Omagh. Wow! £ 0.61, a bargain ... oops, I realized soon after, different £'s. The apparent 10% discount was exactly the difference in currency.

scholes

The British fetish for owning property has been the bandwagon upon which the world and his wife have exploited.
Lenders, chartered surveyors, developers, buy to let investors have milked it for all it's worth.
Everybody knew that rising property prices would eventually have to slow down or even start receding just like it did in the early nineties, when the spectre of negative equity became an unpalatable fact of life. It's now looming large again and hitting those hardest in the buy-to-let property market.

Yet here is still a huge demand for property - according to Radio 4 this morning some 4 million people want to either buy or are on waiting lists for their first home.
They can't and we all know why-it's called elementary mathematics.
Developers are allegedy controlling the output of new houses so that the market prices are kept as high as possible.They have at their disposal large landbanks, and so it follows that the future provision of new houses is largely in the hands of these business men.
They're in it for the buck, nothing else. Greedy or just business? A legacy of
Thatcherism that's for sure.
The credit crunch has now put a rather large spoke in the wheel, and we are likely to see a further drop in interest rates in order to steady the market.