Very recently I completed the purchase of my first property. It’s only a small house but it’s on a nice estate and in the area that I wanted to live in. I have to admit that I only bought the house after reading Andy Shaw’s book “Money For Nothing and Your Property for Free”.

For a couple of years I was convinced that there was an impending house price crash and was subconciously “waiting” for it to occur. After a while though I decided just to jump in.

Now that I have my name on the deeds and a hefty mortgage to pay, I have had a look around to see what others are saying about this so-called “crash”.

It has been quite enlightening.

On one particular forum, several extremely bearish individuals called the housing market top towards the middle of 2002 and they are still desperately waiting for this alleged crash to occur. Many of them sold up in 2002 and are renting, praying for a crash so they can buy back their properties.

What has actually happened is that they have missed triple digit growth in many areas. Must be a really bitter pill to swallow.

A friend mentioned that they were selling up as they thought that the crash was coming very soon.

I don’t think there will be a crash – I can’t see it happening due to several factors:

• If the price was to fall by 20-30% (a massive crash by any standard), many investors including myself would jump right in as soon as the market started to increase again after the fall. This would speed up the market rise back to the price before the fall
• No-one is creating any more land. This country is very small and starting to get over-crowded but people will always need somewhere to live. There is very little land left to build on so existing properties will become more expensive. It’s all down to supply and demand. No supply, the price will rise. No demand, the price will fall. In the UK the demand is always increasing yet the supply of housing cannot keep up.
• Interest rates may have risen a little since the all-time low a few years ago but they are nowhere near the 16% they got to at one point. Could they get there again? I doubt it, but I am no economist 🙂

So, as you can see I am bullish on house prices and I am looking to invest in some buy-to-lets in the very near future. I realise that I have only just bought my first property but the process was pretty straightforward and nowhere near as hard as I thought it would be.

And if I don’t take the chance I don’t want to be kicking myself in 10 years thinking about what “could’ve been”…