Middle Class Whinge, no.3
Nigel Farndale tops even Nick Cohen's £100,000 is not enough to live on piece in today's Sunday Telegraph. He says:The long expected crash in the housing market has begun... How I fantasise about reading that headline.
And why? Are Farndale and his wife first-time buyers, trying desperately to get a foothold on the market. Er...no.
For the past six months we have been renting, I should explain, having sold our house in London.
Ok, perhaps he just bought it a few months before and so might as well be a first time buyer. Er...no.
The presenter, Evan Davis, played a clip from Panorama that was broadcast in 1986. "Leppoc Road, Clapham. A typical street of back-to-back Victorian terrace houses. Here prices have gone through the roof. Ten years ago this house was worth £14,000. Mercedes and Hugh have just bought it for £145,000..." I know what Mercedes and Hugh sold it for 10 years later because Mercedes and Hugh sold it to Mary and Nigel.
So Farndale bought the house in 1996. He sold it 'six months ago', which would be August 2006. The only house on that street sold in August was this one [if the link doesn't work go to www.nethouseprices.com and search for the street name above, and look at no.10) sold for £750,000.
How much did the house gain in those ten years? We don't know how much Farndale paid for it, but the Nationwide house price calculator for London as a whole suggests a house selling for £750,000 in Aug 07 would have cost around £250,000 in Q4 1996. In other words a house price gain of half a million pounds.
This calculation is not 100% accurate for a few reasons, mainly because that road in Clapham might show different patterns of price growth than London as a whole. In fact a house sold in 1986 in London for £145,000 would have been less than £200,000 by 1996, but Clapham probably started gaining earlier. Also any work on the property will have some (less important) impact. But I doubt the errors are major* - we are talking about a huge gain in the value of the house (basically because Farndale bought at exactly the right time).
So what is he saying? He bought a house in 1996, not long after house prices suffered a major slump, and has enjoyed a gain of £50,000 a year or so. He now has sold it, and wants house prices to collapse so he can repeat the process. This is worth a column in a national newspaper. The sense of entitlement is astonishing.
* There is also a small chance that there was another house sold in August which hasn't been included on nethouseprices.com, which would affect these calculations only in the absolute sense, not percentage wise.
Labels: Sunday Telegraph
posted by Matthew @ 3/18/2007 01:28:00 PM
Comments: 4
