Oh, please.
Scoff if you like, but this is how fast things can change:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/05/housingmarket.houseprices
Only late last year UK market was booming, high immigration, low vacancy rates, sound familiar ?
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Oh, please.
Scoff if you like, but this is how fast things can change:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/05/housingmarket.houseprices
Only late last year UK market was booming, high immigration, low vacancy rates, sound familiar ?
Average wage in Shanghai I believe is around RMB 700 per MONTH......thats 100 bucks, I am not sure if I believe this, although if you look behind the glitz and all the cool skyscrapers there are people living in pretty ordinary conditions...your average cab driver gets around RMB 4,000 - 5,000 per month (around $AUD 600 - $AUD 1000)..most professionals are getting around $AUD 20K per annum and up, AFAIK.
This is interesting to me as most of the wages are so low, but house prices so very high. A lot of the RE seems to be owned by institutional investors rich Chinese industrialists and a lot of rich Taiwanese business people.
property prices in China and Vietnam are in a speculative bubble.
Scoff if you like, but this is how fast things can change:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/05/housingmarket.houseprices
Only late last year UK market was booming, high immigration, low vacancy rates, sound familiar ?
Excellent excellent point. Many investors are above wage earners and many buyers aren't first home buyers and are cashed up the money they've made in other investments."Average" earnings are irrelevant if your target audience doesnt earn "average" wages.
Australia has a very similar home ownership rate (~70%) as the UK and USA.
There's not a lot different in the mindsets of these markets, British also aspire to own their own home. What is new there is buy to let (IPs), which has only really become popular in the last 10 years.I think what you should have said is 'This is how fast things can change in the UK'
What I don't think you are taking into consideration is the 'mindset' of the English (and the Americans) as opposed to that of the Australians.
You can quote figures and statistics all day long but it does not reflect the 'underlying' thinking regarding real estate that is going on in the collective 'head' of the people in each country.
I was born in England and lived in London for the early part of my life so I have some experience of how they think.
My grandparents rented the same house in south London for over 30 years and it never occurred to them to buy it or any other house. Why?, rent was about the same as mortgage payments (maybe less then) and was easy.
My parents were the first in the family to buy and that was only because my father liked renovating.
The whole 'buy your own house' thing only became popular in the UK in the mid '70's onward.
Conversely, the Australians view home ownership as the Holy Grail of social success. Property 'booms and busts' are viewed as problematic but don't alter the 'Grand Plan" for the vast majority.
Until this attitude changes, and I don't think it ever will, Australia will probably be the best place on Earth to invest in real estate.
^^^
renting will be HUGE in australia in the next 10 years as the generation under me focus more on their ringtones and wii's than property ownership.
mam544 said:The whole 'buy your own house' thing only became popular in the UK in the mid '70's onward.
There's not a lot different in the mindsets of these markets, British also aspire to own their own home. What is new there is buy to let (IPs), which has only really become popular in the last 10 years.
So if (i) a greater proportion rented before the mid '70s and (ii) landlording only became popular in the last 10 years, who owned all the rental homes before the '70s?
'The council' is part of the answer, but there must still have been a substantial private rental market back then.
Possibly private landlording was quite large scale but considered the preserve of 'the rich'. It was probably thought eccentric or mildly exploitative until the 1980s. It was probably only spoken about in hushed tones and not publicised in popular books, papers and seminars.
The fact that ordinary people could landlord probably didn't even enter into the minds of the average porridge-eating pommie trade unionist existing in their damp little rented terrace under the dismal skies.
Unlike the Continentals few English got post-secondary education, and unlike socially and geographically mobile Americans, most poms seemed to accept the class structure and their position in it.
Thatcher pretty much legitimised 'popular capitalism' and made 'individual success' okay. This plus council home sales and easy credit must have transformed the relationship between the population and housing much more than it did here (where ownership has been widespread for longer).