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Yesterday the various newspapers published articles about UK Housing over the last 50 years. Although there are minor differences based on each publications political bias and readership, essentially most reports were pretty similar. Personally I like to use the power of the internet to track down the original source of articles, and read that myself. If you would like to do this yourself with this report it can be downloaded from Lloyds Bank and here are my own observations, which I hope you find different to the average journalistic view.
House Prices to Fall
Property is a great investment, but it’s important to buy the right property, it’s not when but where that counts.
Whilst in Real Terms property is appreciating at a very impressive 2.7% p.a. (a widely reported statistic) when in 1979 – 1989 prices shot ahead of this long term average (they rose 61%) it was followed by a decade when prices fell 22%. This pattern has been repeated with prices rising 62% during 1999 – 2009 and so if history repeats itself we might well expect prices during 2009 – 2019 to fall at least 20%.
As always location is more important than timing. As an example – if you got your timing as bad as you could get it and bought in 1989 instead of 1999 then by 2009 your gain would be only 40% instead of 62%. However regional differences in the price changes are much more dramatic – over 100% between London (229%) and Scotland (120%) over the period 1969 – 2009.
Social Trends
People are now living on their own.
Since 1971 Single Parents have risen 400% !!!! Single people are “only” up 75%.
In 1971 these two categories formed 21% of households – less than a third of the 70% for married couples, today they are equal in number to married couples (42%)
The original document which is the source of this data can be found at http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/2010/50_Years_of_Housing_UK.pdf
Jack Daly 
Nice analysis, Nick! Thought-provoking as ever.