Rosie M. - Icon of the Dinner party BTL speculators

[drbubb]

Dinner party conversation turns to property and the credit crunch

/see: http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life...icle3763252.ece

 

.. alt.Rosie.image

 

(What did the bank say your property was worth?)

 

"My neighbour took a deep breath, and told me the figure given by her surveyor. Let’s call it X. Was X a great deal less than Y? Dear reader, it certainly was. Silence descended on the table. We all drank some more red wine. The only way I can sum up the sentiment is that it is like believing you weigh 9st, and then finding out you are actually pushing 10."

. . .

"It might be. “It’s over. It’s all over,” said a friend of mine at the theatre the other night. (As it happens, we were drinking white wine, that evening.) “The banks have done it, and we’ll be picking up the pieces with our mortgages and a housing crash, while they go off with their severance packages.”

 

He laughed in a hollow way and polished off the wine. “We are going to have to get used to a brave new world.

Negative equity, I salute you.” Well, at least we’ll go down with vigour, if go down we must."

 

(Happy wine-swilling bagholders? Maybe that's what we need in a downturn.)

 

She's a great object lesson in fashionable complacency.

I hope she keeps the commentary going along the whole painful path to backruptcy,

or waking up and selling out. Let's see which comes first

[drbubb]

I am really going after the media on this - their fostering of complacency:

 

POSTED THIS:

 

Who's to blame for the housing market slowdown?

Brown, banks, or estate agents - who carries the can for our financial turmoil?

 

"You are asking the wrong question- do you blame gravity when things fall down.

 

 

The question you should be asking is: Who is to blame for property prices going to such excessive levels in the first place.

 

My answer: it was a happy conspiricy amongst those with vested interests in prices rising: the labour government, banks, estate agents... and the media too. The BBC and even newspapers need to take their share of the blame for pumping out empty commentary, which was mostly entertainment, rather than treating the subject of property cycles in a serious way.

 

No wonder people are gravitating towards the web, and sites like HPC, and GlobalEdgeInvestors dotcom, where they can have a serious debate with serious people."

 

Here: http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life.../article3764150

== ==

[drbubb]

IF YOU ARE THICK ENOUGH, you can join "the club"

============

 

Property seminars 'play on the ignorance of buy-to-let investors' Fred Redwood

Have you ever wondered what goes on at the property “seminars” you see advertised in all types of publications?

 

I went along to one recently hosted by the George Wimpey Property Investor Club at the Britannia International Hotel, in the London Docklands, to find out.

 

The venue was impressive - a 440-room hotel, all gilt and glass. The sales “pitch” - let's call it that and put the silly “seminar” idea to one side - took place in a first-floor conference room and was due to start at 6.30pm. There was no meet-and-greet formality. Instead my fellow punters, many looking distinctly uncomfortable, found themselves on a landing walled by advertising boards, each showing posters of the apartment blocks you find in all our towns and cities.

 

Why, I asked, had these particular individuals been targeted? “It's simply a way for us to set up a dialogue with smaller-scale investors,” said Kevin Belsham, the sales and marketing director at Taylor Wimpey, which ran the session. “We have 2,500 members in our club and we like to give them the sort of discounts that would normally be reserved for seasoned investors.”

 

It all sounded sweetly innocent and unthreatening, but I was struck by one thing. The punters, who were by now on the receiving end of a charm offensive from the smiley-faced sales staff, were being referred to as members of the “club”. Yet no enrolment appeared to have been carried out. It transpired that anyone who had ever bought a home from Wimpey could be a member of its “club”. So, too, could the people who had responded to the advertisement on the company website. In fact, this “club” was open to more or less anyone."

. . .

"Nobody addressed one vital topic - the oversupply of apartments. No mention was made of the Knight Frank research that had just appeared showing investors' yields on new flats had fallen to their lowest levels in many cities. Nor did they mention that Knight Frank and Savills forecast only 3 per cent growth in 2008. Instead, our attention was drawn to the bargain prices. There were flats in Corby and Derby with 15 per cent price reductions; some in Greater Manchester and Bolton had 20 per cent off; and flats in Newport, Gwent and Cardiff Bay offered guaranteed rental incomes until 2010.

 

During the following few days I contacted experts and asked if they thought it wise to invest in mid-priced, buy-to-let apartments at that time. If not, these sales seminars were surely just a way of off-loading on novice investors the glut of apartments that were “sticking”."

 

/more: http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life...icle3590238.ece

 

== ==

 

(Hey, where were articles like this on the way up into the peak of the bubble?

They were on HPC, GHPC, and GEI- that's where. But not in The Times.)

[drbubb]

A BETTER WAY?

============

 

Here: http://my.telegraph.co.uk/drbubb/Default.htm/Property

&

Here's what I was posting on TheTimes last summer:

 

Those luxury riverside developments are taking on the air of a ...23 Aug 2007 ...

Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank, said that he could not foresee any crash in prime Central London prices because of the chronic shortage of supply. However, he said that prices could flatten rapidly if bonuses and banking jobs were cut

 

comment:

There's some truth buried in the spin of this article. The market has turned, the future looks dire for Uk property owners.

 

Sadly, the "chronic supply shortage" that the EA's are talking about is only relative to pumped up speculative demand, which is fading fast as reality sets it.

 

The UK market is about one year behind the US property market, but it is now playing catch-up.

DrBubb, London and Hong Kong, England ...

 

business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/property_and_mortgages/article2310516.ece

[G0ldfinger]

It seems from what I read on the internet that people are not very sympathetic with Rosie Millards negative equity.

 

I guess most knew that those 2-bedroom mews in London that went for over £2 million wouldn't be that expensive forever.

[marceau]

(What did the bank say your property was worth?)

 

"My neighbour took a deep breath, and told me the figure given by her surveyor. Let’s call it X. Was X a great deal less than Y? Dear reader, it certainly was. Silence descended on the table. We all drank some more red wine. The only way I can sum up the sentiment is that it is like believing you weigh 9st, and then finding out you are actually pushing 10."

 

Nice to know that these people have concerns of such gravitas. It was so bad - we had to drink more fine wine!

Oh, and darling Katie put on a stone! Call the UN!

 

. . .

"It might be. “It’s over. It’s all over,” said a friend of mine at the theatre the other night. (As it happens, we were drinking white wine, that evening.) “The banks have done it, and we’ll be picking up the pieces with our mortgages and a housing crash, while they go off with their severance packages.”

 

No the banks haven't done it Rosie, you have, by being an utter halfwit.

 

He laughed in a hollow way and polished off the wine. “We are going to have to get used to a brave new world.

Negative equity, I salute you.” Well, at least we’ll go down with vigour, if go down we must."

 

Lucky you can 'go down with vigour' with a glass of wine in hand, many of those who you helped to con into buying overpriced property will have no such luxury.

 

 

It wouldn't surprise me to find this article was written just to provoke an outraged response from the HPC crowd, but sadly I think Ms Millard genuinely is this detached from reality.

 

An acquintance of mine has spent the last 2 years telling me how rich his house was making him and that he would never see a loss because it was all 'funny money' (his exact words). He has been trying to sell in order to take up a new job elsewhere in the UK and the house has been on the market for 7 months, despite him dropping the price by 25% (right on the border of negative equity). I just couldn't feign sympathy for him and actually laughed when he told me, although I held off doing any more than that. His indignant reaction said it all: I guess I'll have to stay as quiet in public about my glee at the crash as I did about my disagreement with the rise.

 

This is why I like sites like this, I could express my opinions on the markets here without being called a doomster or a loon while things were still going up, and will now just as easily be able to laugh my ass off on here as things go down without being called nasty or cruel. Suits me fine, I'll just carry on profiting from their mistakes, and taking money from the likes of Rosie Millard is surely the most rewarding work in the world.

[Member100]

This is why I like sites like this, I could express my opinions on the markets here without being called a doomster or a loon while things were still going up, and will now just as easily be able to laugh my ass off on here as things go down without being called nasty or cruel. Suits me fine, I'll just carry on profiting from their mistakes, and taking money from the likes of Rosie Millard is surely the most rewarding work in the world.

 

LOL

Dont worry, Marceau. There are loads of "doomsters and loons" here. In fact, they make better company than the average Joe or average Gillian, in case you havent noticed.

 

Here's another loon (Michael Shedlock) writing about UK property prices:

 

1/

Comment: Where was the Council of Mortgage Clowns hiding when the bubble was being created? And who gets to determine "reasonable prices"? Perhaps mortgage rates were too reasonable, too long. What needs to happen is for housing prices to crash. The sooner home prices become affordable the better off everyone will be.

 

2/

Comment: There should be nothing alarming about the drop at all. Rather what was alarming was how big the bubbles got in the UK, Spain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, China, etc., etc., etc. People have this alarming thing ass backwards.

 

3/

Comment: A badly needed correction is underway. It will likely last for years. Fear should not be that home prices crash. The fear should be the BOE does something stupid to try and prevent a crash

 

snips from- http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com...-footsteps.html

 

[G0ldfinger]

...

Comment: A badly needed correction is underway. It will likely last for years. Fear should not be that home prices crash. The fear should be the BOE does something stupid to try and prevent a crash

...

As Jim Puplava says, it takes a politician to make a recession into a depression.

 

I am very confident that Brown and the BoE will manage to engineer a fantastic depression.

[drbubb]

...2-bedroom mews in London that went for over £2 million ...

 

Tell me it isnt true!

 

[drbubb]

MARTIN WOLFE - tells it like it is- and should be...

 

It is high time the British realised a people cannot become rich by selling ever more expensive houses to one another. According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook UK house prices are more overvalued, relative to economic fundamentals, than those of almost any other high-income country. At long last, investors in mortgage-backed securities, all too aware of what has happened in the US, have realised the dangers in the UK.

 

They must understand that it becomes extraordinarily difficult to know what such securities are worth as soon as house prices start to fall. They must also be aware that UK house prices have risen by a good 150 per cent since 1996, in real terms. Indeed, It would take a 25 per cent fall in real prices to put them on to the 1971-2007 trend line, last hit in January 2002. Such a decline is conceivable. Prices might overshoot downwards, but they are nowhere near that position now.

 

Peter Spencer, chief economist of the Ernst & Young Item club, argues that the government should step in, by borrowing to fund the mortgage market. With great respect, I think this notion is mad.

 

/more: http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/ind...showtopic=74861

[drbubb]

QUOTE = g@@@@ @ Apr 20 2008 = = =

Either it means fuck all to her or she's incredibly shallow.

UNQUOTE

 

If you are relying on your appearance to make a living, and you have been telling yourself

(without wanting to stand on the scales) that you had avoided putting on weight, then

suddenly waking up and finding you had put on a stone - is a big deal.

 

Superficial? Yes. Lying to oneself? Yes. Forced out of denial? Yes.

Seems rather apt to me. Sums up a sudden painful awakening to someone who would rather

have stayed in denial.

 

Now, Rosie is not proposing a sudden crash diet, to get rid of the excess weight (Selling.)

She has toasted the extra pounds, and had a glass of wine, saying perhaps she should

just accept that the weight is there, and her appearance is going to pot.

 

Actually, I think this is the very first reluctant step in facing reality. After the hangover fades,

she will think about selling. But in a market like this, where everyone else has woken up that

property is wildly overpriced, it is going to be hard to find a buyer and shed the dead weight

of overpriced properties.

[drbubb]

Rosie Update, but not so Rosy:

http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/ind...showtopic=75394

 

... She talked about her £50k unsecurred debt. Is putting her car up for sale apparently

 

...she was worried about her remortgage later in the year (nov i think). She seems to be slowly waking up to how bad things could get, and acknowledges the middle classes will struggle to adapt. I suspect she's already cottoned on to what her unsecured debts mean for her remortgage rate.

 

I think she is still not facing reality.

Selling a car is unlikely to clear such a large debt.

And what are her chances of getting a larger loan, or even the same loan, in November.

 

She is going to have to start selling, I reckon. And in a very soft market.

This is the wages of greed. It is very sad.

 

[drbubb]

SEW WHAT ?

 

Join me in the new austerity

As she curbs her free-spending ways, our correspondent discovers she is in tune with millions of fellow Britons who have been forced by the credit crunch to find innovative ways to trim their household expenditureRosie Millard

It is gleaming, electronic and full of exciting variations at the touch of a dial. It is also deeply fashionable. So much so, that last year Woolworths reported that its sales had risen 289% in 12 months.

 

Last week I bought myself one. It is now holding court on a table in the middle of the living room. As I plug it in, my children stand around it, looking on with awe. Auspiciously, it lights up. No, it’s not a giant iPod — it’s a sewing machine.

 

As the daughter of a feminist, I was never taught how to use a sewing machine. In the 1970s that sort of thing was infra dig. How times have changed. Nowadays disapproval of throwaway clothing and the price of summer dresses at Gap means that far from presenting a threat to female emancipation, a £49 sewing machine from Woolworths seems an astute investment.

 

Courses in sewing skills are burgeoning...

 

/more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3822981.ece

 

== ==

 

WHY NOT just Sell, rather than Sew?

Or has she left it too long??

 

[HollandPark]

WHY NOT just Sell, rather than Sew?

Or has she left it too long??

 

She should have SOLD OUT... now she needs to SEW OUT a whole new future.

 

What comes after being a Dinner Party Property Tycoon?

A seamstress? Or, So it seems

 

"Somewhere amid the effort involved in constructing our highly educated, cultured, aspirational lives, there is an entire generation that has forgotten about home economics. Faced with the credit crunch, many of us are paying for lessons about domestic budgeting that we never bothered getting for free when we were young."

 

Is she laughing at herself? If so, a healthy thing maybe.

 

"Whipping your credit card to within an inch of its limit is not cool any more."

 

"THE reason for the rush to the cheaper side of life is quite simple: the cost of living has rocketed while our salaries have not."

 

Rosie, where were you when we were telling you, that this excess just might mean

the Property prices were overvalued

[drbubb]

"Whipping your credit card to within an inch of its limit is not cool any more."

"THE reason for the rush to the cheaper side of life is quite simple: the cost of living has rocketed while our salaries have not."

 

She wont last long now- she is starting to sound like Merryn:

 

"The children have never looked so healthy. They are slim and fit — because they walk everywhere. The London congestion charge, better public transport and unspeakable parking restrictions mean that it is hardly ever worth using the car. Last week I suddenly saw our family Volvo as a five-door pile of cash that might usefully pay off the last dregs of my formerly monster overdraft (£50,000 at its worst). And so the car is up for sale.

 

This doesn’t mean I’m never going to drive again. The joy of the new austerity is that there are attractive options out there for the canny consumer. The car club Streetcar has loads of parking spots in my borough, each with a nice little Golf sitting on it. The nearest is about two minutes’ walk from my house. You can book a car online for about £5 an hour."

 

And the property advertisers on TimesOnline will not like that sort of anti-shopping good sense.

I reckon she will be "toast" within 3 months, just as she was begniing to make some sense!