As long as people are willing and able to pay for way overpriced property the housing market will continue to grow. It is my opinion that there is a queue of such people that are still in a panic to buy properties. There's as much evidence to suggest that the housing market will continue to grow in the short-term as there is for it to fall.
I'm in total agreement that it can't be sustained, all the evidence points to that,
but when will we see this crash/slowdown?
No evidence on this thread has me convinced that it's occurring now.
That's fine, take what's written here with a pinch of salt, but you see you haven't given any reasons for why you think the market will continue for the next 18 months apart from anecdotal "queues of people" that you've allegedly witnessed. Please tell us when and where.
'whathome' posted this on property bubbles a few days ago:
whathome said:
John P. Calverley is chief economist and strategist at American Express. He has produced a checklist for typical characteristics of a bubble:
- Rapidly rising prices
- High expectations for continuing rapid rises
- Overvaluation compared to historical averages
- Overvaluation compared to reasonable levels
- Several years into an economic upswing
- Some underlying reason or reasons for higher prices
- A new element, e.g. technology for stocks or immigration for housing
- Subjective "paradigm shift" (It's different this time)
- New investors drawn in
- New entrepreneurs in the area
- Considerable popular and media interest
- Major rise in lending
- Increase in indebtedness
- New lenders or lending policies
- Consumer price inflation often subdued (so central banks relaxed)
- Relaxed monetary policy
- Falling household savings rate
- A strong exchange rate
and what about the many reasons for changing sentiment that have been given already:
- rising interest rates (fact)
- rising energy costs (fact)
- change of government to one less favourable to developers (probable)
- stagnant rental market (fact)
- poor infrastructure making commuterland less and less attractive(fact)
- land corruption and artificially high land prices (fact)
- rapidly increasing inventory (fact)
- media hype and hard-sell of the 'latest developments' (anecdotal)
- unscrupulous availability of cheap money from the european banks (fact)
- Irish economic threats as a result of US economy (possibility)
- economic reliance on house-builing (fact)
- reliance on cheap imported labour (anecdotal)
- transient immigrant population who will up and leave if spooked (probable)
- Irish obsession with land-owning (fact)
- possibility that large numbers of section 23 investors will dump their investment properties onto the market if spooked (possibility)
etc., etc.
Do you have anything to add that proportionaly counteracts the above threats, facts and risks to the Irish property market?
I just cannot see how anyone can predict that "the housing market will continue to grow rapidy for at least another 18 months", I'm sorry, I really can't.
Also, are you a house/apartment/duplex owner? If yes, when and where did you buy?