Predicting The Housing Market in 2010 is Less Easy than People Seem to Think

It must be because its Christmas, but in the last 15 minutes I have read three forecasts for what the housing and buy to let markets will look like in 2010 and everyone of them offered an oversimplified view.

One report in this is London, said that house prices in Central London would soar to their pre-crunch levels next year, and would have grown a staggering 80% by 2012 because of the "halo effect" from the Olympics. All while the rest of the UK "stagnates".

Since the article contained no real substance on where all this growth was going to come from next year, I will go the same route: without bonused-up bankers on a spending spree you've a fat chance of prices soaring. They may continue their awkward juts upward, but these will either be followed by a reversal of that growth or stagnation as the underlying economy will not be supporting house price growth until 2011.

We should all be upset if prices in Central London don't rise, because this growth spreads into other sectors and other areas. Well, I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned central London house prices are driven by a mixture of greed, arrogance and egotism, and call me foolish but I hope it doesn't spread to my area.

Disagree, but how else can you explain a house languishing on the market; struggling to sell at £250, 000 one week, and back on the market and sold for £500,000 a week after one of the big banks doled out its bonuses.

The second was on the Property Hawk blog, which is a blog I love usually. However, in a post looking at an Association of Residential Letting Agents forecast for a bleak 2010 the editor writes:

"With over supply of rental properties because of the accidental landlord reducing and rental demand remaining high my feeling is that the outlook for landlords is not so bleak."

Maybe he/she has a Crystal ball but when did we get so sure that forced landlords would reduce or continue reducing in 2010. Yes, house prices are going up in and around London but not elsewhere. At any rate, according to a recent report by the BDRC research group forced landlords make up just 1% of landlords anyway.

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