With house prices crashing and the entire country saturated with desperate sellers trying to offload their unwanted properties, I thought I should try to watch at least one edition of Location, Location, Location. I was curious how Kristie and Phil would respond to the changing market sentiment.
Kristie and Phil fired back the answer within 30 second. Nothing has changed. The market is still hot, and first time buyers are still struggling. The property ramping started from the get go. It was as if the last 10 months had never happened.
Last night’s offering was so awful I could not bear watching more than 20 minutes. It was tedious, repetitive, and dull. Did the happy-go-lucky artist find her dream flat in Luton? Did the fussy couple from London move to the country? Who cares?
It was five minutes into the tedium before Kristie dared mention anything about the credit crunch or crashing prices. It was obviously a last minute layover, since the programme was almost certainly filmed a year ago. The camera pulled away from Luton and we saw Kristie and Phil, sitting in a pub. They told us that they had the solution for all those first time buyers who are finding it difficult to buy because of the credit crunch. The answer; reduce stamp duty.
After a self-seeking party political broadcast on behalf of the conservative party explaining why stamp duty was a bad thing, we then saw Kristie trying to call Alistair Darling. “Why won’t he answer my questions?” Why is Kristie on TV pushing this political biased tat is a much better question.
During the twenty tedious minutes that I watched, Kristie failed to mention falling house prices. Presumably, in her world, such a thing cannot happen. However, the Halifax just published their latest price index. It is down 2.4 percent in just one month.
4 comments:
Kristie was just dreadful last night, it was one of the worst.
You might as well as be asking a paedophile to stop molesting children.
Harsh. But they both willfully ruin lives.
Nick
I wish Kirsty would get a grasp of real life. People will pay as much as they can possibly afford for a given house. Stamp duty just ramps the notional asking price DOWN a bit to compensate. Remove stamp duty and house prices will just go up (or in the present climate down a bit less) to compensate.
John,
This is a simple fact of behavioural economics that wannabe social planners never grasp. When a product/service is socially stratified most people will stand on their tiptoes and nobody will see any better. Stamp duty merely diverts a portion to the government rather than the seller or the lender.
It's one of the few justifications for taxation out there.
Nick
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