What the king & queen of buy-to-let can tell us about UK house prices

Two maths teachers became the unlikely pin-ups of the buy-to-let business during the boom years. But the crash exposed the shaky foundations of their empire. John Stepek looks at what their story reveals about the state of today's housing market – and why another house price crash is inevitable.

Fergus and Judith Wilson, a couple of maths teachers from Kent, became the unlikely pin-ups of the buy-to-let industry during the property boom years.

In an interview at the weekend with The Guardian, the pair discussed their decision to retire. Retiring seems a bit of a premature description. They still have to offload their properties all 700-odd before they're free of the landlord business.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.