No matter what happens to housing prices, there's upsides and downsides and the winners almost universally are those with money.

When house prices are low, rich people can snap up lots of housing and just hang onto it and wait for it to go high - they have no mortgage, they don't care if it takes ten years. Literally every penny in rent is income, and their only expense is whatever it takes to keep the house rentable and maybe a council tax bill.

When house prices are high, rich people can sell off their housing portfolios while also being the only people who can afford a house themselves.

When house prices are low, poor people can't afford houses because the rich people are outbidding them every time and snapping up dozens of them.

When house prices are high, poor people can't afford houses.

It doesn't matter how you look at it in terms of the economy at large, or forecasts, it's about how many toys you let people gather and cling onto with almost no consequences, while others have nothing.

I just bought a house. I don't really care if it "drops in value". There's nothing I can do about it, one way or the other, and unless I decide to sell it it makes no difference.Even when I do, selling my X bedroom house will give me enough money to buy... an X bedroom house in a similar area.

My mortgage costs the same whatever and will actually be going UP in cost no matter what I do, eventually.

It's the third house I've bought in my lifetime (and had to sell the previous one each time), and it's going to be the last I'll ever get. I was driving 150+ mile round-trips to view houses. I had "no chain". I was being outbid by everyone - like me - who was moving out of London because they can't afford it, and I had to go THAT FAR OUT to stand a chance of viewing things that weren't sold by the time I could drive there.

I was able to get my parents to put down a deposit (I'm 40-fucking-3 and couldn't afford it! Mainly because I was renting for years) and that's never going to happen again until they both die and my brother and we sell their house and split the proceeds (neither of us could afford to keep it).

I got a 1-bed former-council bungalow, 40 miles from where I work. Because that's literally all I could get, on a single income. The mortgage is paid over 24 years because I'm too old to have a 25-year mortgage. That's only EVER going to get worse.

I've actually got a way-above-average job, but I can't secure anything on my own, and I was pushed out of buying everything else I saw. I had an elderly couple at a viewing tell me that "young people like me..." (FORTY FUCKING THREE!) "... should just rent a flat in the main town near all the noisy nightclubs" and leave them to look at the suburban homes in reasonable areas for their downsizing for retirement.

Housing is only ever going to get more expensive. It's only ever going to be the domain of the rich. It's only ever going to get worse. Until something absolutely drastic changes... like literally charging tax for second homes so humongously that only the extreme elite can afford to have one.

We're growing in population all the time. We're not building ANYWHERE NEAR enough housing. And we need to build it 20, 30 years in advance at least just to be able to catch up to demand.

Until rent control is a thing (so that being a landlord isn't that profitable), or owning a second property is taxed to the hilt, or people are forced to occupy all their properties at least 90% of the year either by themselves or a paying tenant, or someone builds tens of thousands of houses all of a sudden, it's never going to get any better and no "economy change" is going to make any difference to the poor staying poor and renting (which makes them poorer) and the rich staying rich and being landlords (which makes them richer).

Until the rules change, you will always lose. Unless you're rich.

Even my house - it was original a council house built in the 60's for disabled and elderly and SOME TWAT decided to let someone buy it for a pittance several decades ago. So now there's less suitable council housing for people in need like the disabled and elderly, and the guy who happened to be allocated it by the council made a fortune out of it for doing almost nothing, and I can *barely* afford to live there as the only private homeowner in that part of the street, among a bunch of people who are all council-tenants: retired or on benefits and have no money themselves living in all the bigger 3-bed houses around me. Hell, my parents are living in a £600k 3-bed house, with garage and huge garden, just the two of them on their own. They bought it on a single working wage, with only one of them in a minimum-wage job and it's been paid off for the last 10 years. Since I was 20, I've earned more in any given year than my mum and dad ever earned COLLECTIVELY in any year they ever worked in their lifetime - even adjusted for inflation. I know, because I dug out all the statistics and did the maths to show them.

And somewhere there's someone else like me in a tiny bedsit somewhere paying rent through the nose who can't get a council house because there aren't any, and can never stand a chance of buying a house.

And in 20+ years time when I finally pay my house off, and come to retire, I'll likely have to work through retirement to pay the basic bills, and the house will eventually sell for proportionally a pittance that probably won't buy a 1-bed flat anywhere in the country.

It's not the economy that's to blame. It's the way that the division is inherent in the rules and the separations between haves and have-nots, and things like NOT BUILDING ANY FUCKING HOUSES, unless they are designed to be permanent rent-traps for rich landlords.

When the last time house prices fell I was sitting in a pub with a work friend. All those first time buyers or ones who had saved for a second home to make a little as a landlord many found themselves in suddenly negative equity.

Anyway two of his friends who were obviously very well off spent that whole evening taking calls from and phoning up people like that, offering them a price and saying the money would be in a bank in x time once the contract was signed. They could afford to sit on the property until things came back or it recouped by renting.

I reckon they bought about twenty - thirty odd houses in the space of a couple of pints. Their phones never stopped ringing.