The housing market starts to sputter

Soaring house prices can't keep rocketing forever, says John Stepek. It could soon be time to take cover.

This week we return to one of our readers' favourite topics UK house prices. Regular contributor Jonathan Compton looks at the state of the British residential property market and concludes that we're heading for trouble.

There's a reason why house prices are such a perennial topic of conversation in Britain and a regular fixture on these pages it's because the market seems to be in a near-permanent state of overexcitement. Prices corrected drastically after the 2008 financial crisis, but in most parts of the country they have returned to pre-crash levels, and in London and the southeast they have long since surpassed them. House-price-to-average-income ratios across the UK are again at or near record levels, while the plight of first-time buyers is noted by every politician with a policy to sell.

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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.