Apart from interest rates in or near to double digits which kept house prices down. When they started getting into fractions of one percent, what happened to house prices then?
It will prove to be a painful lesson to those that have maxed themselves out and paid more than they could when rates we’re ridiculously low.
It's because of those stupidly low rates that house prices rise to 6 times salary.
This is the interest rate over time.
I still remember my brother buying his first house in the mid 1990s, if we look at the chart the interest rate was bubbling just above 5%... he paid £38,000 for a 2 bed end terrace, this was considered an eye-watering amount of money to borrow at the time but had to be done kinda thing, that house is now worth around £150,000.
My mate bought a similar property in a town 30 miles over, this would have been around 2002 I reckon, he paid £68,000 for that property and I remember thinking "Holy Hell, that's almost double what my bro paid", he sold that his before the 2008 crash for around £170,000... you can see the interest rate at that time was around the same level as the 1990s.
Had salaries increased significantly in that time? Nope... I know my bro was earning far more than £15k per year in 1998 and my mate was probably on more than £30k per year in 2003 because he was an offshore oil worker.
So, no matter how people try to spin it now, the housing market spiralled out of control throughout the 2000s but salaries haven't increased in line, now you have people forced into taking mortgages at levels which are unprecedented, living on the edge of what's affordable and now the interest rates are spiralling which will throw many of them to the wolves.
Meanwhile, people who bought places in the 80's and 90's want to sit there and be smug about "having paid off their house" and "seeing whose really living above their means"... those are the Boomers that someone else asked me to clarify who I was referring to, people who bought their place in the 80s for what is the equivalent of half a years salary for most people these days.