Moving Home with Charlie

Sellers Special on pricing paranoia: why rational fears among sellers and agents are freezing moves, and how to get past them. I started from a rough day after Friday's Five Fact Friday kicked a hornet's nest of angry sellers, then focused on the sellers I most want to help — the ones who have already cut hard, want a realistic market price, and still get almost no interest. We dug into the root causes of the pricing gap (not just "greed"), why inviting three agents and picking the lowest app...

House Price Crash called even before Bank of England forecasts 5% inflation to return. Bank of England hikes base rate back up to 4%, forecasts inflation to rise from 3.2% now to 5% next year. They usually understate it. This is extremely bad news. HMRC confirms September housing transactions missed the usual back to school bounce, making moving more difficult than usual. Bank of England set to increase ‘risky’ borrowing multiple from 4.5x salary up to 5x salary, unlocking £200bn of new de...

A later-than-usual Wednesday live on the story everyone was sending me today: Fred Harrison, the economist who predicted the last two UK housing crashes, told This is Money that a new crash has already begun and that house prices could fall by more than 30% over the next four years. I went through what the article actually says, replayed my own February 2022 call on the top of the market, and compared it with Savills, who have finally moved from forecasting rises to forecasting a 1.5% fall in...

Right now there are more than enough sellers and not enough buyers, so this live was all about helping sellers. I started with the one cold, hard fact every seller has to accept: you can't sell for more than somebody will pay, and the market doesn't care what you, your agent or the headlines think your home is worth. Then I went through the three critical choices every seller has to get right: your conveyancer (the first choice you make, so you can come to market sale-ready), your estate agen...

The Chancellor has confirmed Your First Home, with price caps that make it mostly only viable in the North, and negative equity inbound for most first-time buyers who take it. Zoopla shows house price inflation at just 0.8%, with 35% of homes in areas with annual price falls, 7% more homes for sale and sales agreed down 7%. Even the OBR now expects house price growth and transactions to slide. The Bank of England reports September mortgage approvals were even worse than August, well below the...