Repossessions up by 12%

Going to get worse

The FSA is about to regulate Sell And Rent Back and they are going to do a very bad job. Instead of addressing the problems that occur with a small percentage of transactions they are going to kill the entire industry. Thereby severing a an effective lifeline to homeowners looking to stay in their home.

Come August there is going to be some very bad news out there.

There was a period when house buyers firmly believed, and banks encouraged the belief, that prices would always go up. That is the only basis on which 100% mortgages could be justified.
A simple cost sum would demonstrate that the cost of materials, labour + reasonable profit to erect a house was never anything like the selling prices at some stages of the bubble. The inevitable result happened.

This is really is happening everywhere, I live in Australia and all those years of 110% borrowings are now coming home to roost.

Now we are in a cycle where interest rates are rock bottom, and this just feeds more into a very vicious cycle.

It does give new buyers a chance to get on the property ladder. We purchased an apartment which came on the market after having being repossessed.
The previous owner was a property speculator, who lost out when there was a gap in tenants for several of his properties at the same time - his cash flow didn't continue.

Property repossessions have certainly grown, however initial predicitions within 2009 now seem as if they could be inflated to what we will actually witness.

The whole repossession process takes around 18 months to go through. A worrying trend is the increase in voluntary repossessions, so these are people whose mortgages got into difficulty late '07/early '08 when the market was panicking and products were being pulled left right and center. Ordinarily a number of these people would have re-financed to keep money flowing, however that line has been severed.

Call me "someone with insider knowledge" if you will, but mortgage arrears cases are levelling off and have been doing so for the past 4-5 months. The flow into 3 installments plus has also levelled off

The news of job losses seems to have lessened too, although BT did announce that 15,000 people will be let go - 10% of the UK workfoce.

Maybe I'm heartless but I don't care. People entered a market, and the point about markets is they go up.... and down.

People that believed that the housing market would only ever go up were deluded, and I find it sickening that the government are attempting to 'restore' house prices, at the cost of people like me who chose not to enter an overheated market.

As a tenant with absolutely NO rights if I found that I was being evicted tomorrow because my landlord hadn't paid his mortgage I'm sick of "sob stories" in the media about couples who have split up but can't afford to sell the house. Quite frankly, cry me a river.

I'm sure that I'll ruffle a few feathers with this post, but as you can tell my views are pretty firm on this issue.

That is my point. There are two main concepts about the property market - at one extreme there is the idea of using it as a profitable shareholding, whilst living in it. At the other there is the idea of just buying a place to live in.
Most purchases are not made with the viewpoint of making or losing money - why should that be the idea of property?

happywriter said:

That is my point. There are two main concepts about the property market - at one extreme there is the idea of using it as a profitable shareholding, whilst living in it. At the other there is the idea of just buying a place to live in.
Most purchases are not made with the viewpoint of making or losing money - why should that be the idea of property?

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I would agree, the media has to an extent promoted this view point to the situation where many now see this as a high consideration.