Now might be a good time to buy a house in the north

London house prices have diverged greatly from the rest of the country, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Get ready for the snap-back.

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Selling prices in London look set to fall back into line

In 2007, 70% of UK households owned their own homes. Now just under 65% do. There are all sorts of reasons for this see my blog here on rent controls for a few. But there is of course an element of pricing in here: the higher prices go the fewer successful first time buyers there are in the market.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.