You Want It, You Can Afford It, But You Can’t Have It!

This week has seen the The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors show public caution to the seemingly dramatic rise in house prices over the last eight months. A rise of 5.4% to the end of August is revelation indeed, certainly one at odds with the reality in many parts of Coventry & Warwickshire, let alone the Country as a whole.  Quite how their suggestion of how a cap could occur is not certain but surely it would be almost impossible to control?  Joshua Miller, the RICS Senior Economist believes that the Bank of England  have the ability to instigate such an action, one that has proved successful in Canada and other parts of the World.  Anyone who knows me will know I am the least able to argue with a senior economist of anywhere, let alone the RICS, but  Canada and Britain are two totally different beasts. One has a total lack of space and the other more space than they could use, need, or wish to ruin! This is really the point to address. Demographically certain areas within the country will benefit from price rises and are also able to tolerate them. How in a free economy could you tell homeowners that they could not sell to waiting cash buyers because the buyer wants to pay too much? In contrast there are more areas in the country hoping for a rise in house prices than there are who have already benefitted from them. Once again, the reality seems to sit with the Banks and Mortgage lending. If you need a mortgage to buy a house as virtually all of us do, we have to remember that it is not “our” money which allows the purchase to occur. With this in mind surely the RICS should be focusing their might upon the experienced and proven failures of the past rather than restricting potential growth across this very much imbalanced county and nation as a whole? By Mark Walmsley