End Britain's love affair with bricks and mortar

We should limit housing’s appeal as a speculative asset in favour of more productive investments, says John Stepek.

Buy-to-let landlords in the UK enjoyed a wonderful boom from the late 1990s up until just before the financial crisis (and beyond in some areas). The British have long been partial to property as an asset class. But the huge, leveraged gains seen in the heady days leading up to the 2008 crash, with soaring house prices fuelled by low interest rates, really cemented the view that "you can't go wrong with bricks'n'mortar".

But recently, life has been getting harder for buy-to-let investors. House prices were already at unaffordable levels when the 2008 crisis hit. Prices slid in the immediate aftermath, but with the Bank of England slashing interest rates to near-0% and printing money (via quantitative easing) they didn't stay low for long. Meanwhile, the electoral calculus began to shift. Those who felt shut out of the housing market or feared that their children would be started to outnumber those who saw ever-increasing house prices as only a good thing. And landlords snapping up houses that would otherwise have gone to first-time buyers were an obvious target for their irritation.

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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.