The end of the housing ladder | Barney Ronay | Comment is free | The Guardian
There is a compelling book – or angry tract, or damning Hogarthian illustration – waiting to be published about the vaulting social ascent of estate agents over the last 30 years. Previously a background figure, a clerical facilitator, it was in the 1980s that estate agents enjoyed their first great liberation. Urged centre-stage by the Thatcher-era property boom, they were transformed into a touchstone for a certain strain of yuppified prosperity.
In the years since, the figure of this newly aspirational estate agent filled out. Mainly, it became much posher, morphing into the type of rosy, big-haired, pink-shirted estate agent who makes you feel squint-eyed,poorly dressed and laughably under-gentrified.
I have seen a lot of estate agents in the last few weeks, having taken the stupid and reckless decision to move house. And my experience is that things have changed again. I can reveal that estate agents no longer beam and swagger and emote indestructible poshness into permanently tinkling telephones. Instead, they look a little thinner and a little strained. Something fairly horrible is happening out there, and estate agents, like rifle-toting teenage volunteers in 1914, are right in the frontline.
The ones I've met have spent a lot of time grimacing and folding their hands like priests; cast, as they now are, as the curators of doubt and misery. You hear a lot of rumours about the housing market – but the reality is that, inside those hopefully for-sale-boarded homes, there is a tangible sense of fear and misery, and it is hard to imagine it won't get worse.
I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me personally: I decided to move house for ludicrously self-indulgent reasons, such as not particularly liking where I lived. This is lesson one: don't go anywhere. Don't do anything. Life no longer looks like it used to in reggae-soundtracked adverts for home loans, where moving house is a matter of re-styling as much as relocation. Instead, there appears to be a kind of mass fiscal arm-wrestle going on. The last helicopter is leaving Saigon, and lots of people who thought there was such a thing as a housing "ladder" – a ladder that always goes up, rather than toppling down a ravine while their legs pump uselessly, Wile E Coyote-style – are starting to think there won't be room inside for everyone.
The latest figures, on the face of it, don't look too alarming. The average value of a UK home fell by 0.9% in August, the third successive month of decline. Now 0.9% is a fairly un-scary number – the kind of number that, from the outside, you can frown over dimly then just sort of ignore. But let me clutch you with my skinny hand and fix you with my Ancient Mariner stare and tell you what I've seen, if not exactly behind the figures, then in and around them.
Fear stalks the plantation-shuttered suburbs. There is a tangible sense of some horrible tipping point being reached. People are still moving, but they seem to be moving only because of bad things. On my visits, the Divorce House has become a grisly recurrent private joke (the unmown lawn, the brave faces . . .). Desperate price slashes are common: the top-spec dream home hurled on to the bonfire of the Just Reduced and the Keen to Sell. Even among the ranks of baby boomers, complacently touting their unmortgaged goldmine, there is a sense of pinched and disbelieving affront. I know of three cases of estate agents angrily abused by their economically immobilised clients. (How long before we see security grilles in agents' offices, and those signs that say "Our staff have the right not to suffer violence or abuse", which immediately make you want to abuse someone violently?)
It may be hard to feel sorry for the post-boom-era house vendor. Why should we pity the privileged as their swag-bag of future-proof riches is marginally tithed and diminished? Even in my south London suburb, prices are inflated beyond the reach of most people. But this is still a little unfair. House-price money may be largely imaginary – bank-bound, tied up in value estimates and equity balances – but the anxiety is real. Home-owners suffer, too.
And these people at the middle of this deflating housing bubble are hardly to blame for its existence. They, too, feel duped. I had an epiphany the other day, when I met The Best Estate Agent Ever. A man who was blessed with a child-like far-sightedness. "I've been going into these houses for years," he said, as we mooched around some price-slashed, buzz-free, distinctly non-hot vessel of human misery. "They go in and rip everything out. It is absolute consumerism. We are the generation McDonald's was marketing at 30 years ago. Not surprising we've ended up like this. Lovely coving there. Chipped."
It is this practice of recreational house-moving that has now come to a stop. The sense that you have a duty to upscale and upgrade, that growth and expansion are inevitable, and things will just keep getting better and more valuable. Recreational house-moving was a factor in the boom of the Blair years. Unlike him, it has now disappeared.
We are left, instead, with an insidiously spreading damp-stain of house-bound anguish. Perhaps we can even begin to feel sympathy for the estate agent. Some estimates suggest 4,000 of them will be made redundant before the recession is through. In their latest incarnation – chastened, derided carriers of bad news – those that remain might even end up being your only companion through an increasingly hazy and frightening underworld.
There is a compelling book – or angry tract, or damning Hogarthian illustration – waiting to be published about the vaulting social ascent of estate agents over the last 30 years. Previously a background figure, a clerical facilitator, it was in the 1980s that estate agents enjoyed their first great liberation. Urged centre-stage by the Thatcher-era property boom, they were transformed into a touchstone for a certain strain of yuppified prosperity.
In the years since, the figure of this newly aspirational estate agent filled out. Mainly, it became much posher, morphing into the type of rosy, big-haired, pink-shirted estate agent who makes you feel squint-eyed,poorly dressed and laughably under-gentrified.
I have seen a lot of estate agents in the last few weeks, having taken the stupid and reckless decision to move house. And my experience is that things have changed again. I can reveal that estate agents no longer beam and swagger and emote indestructible poshness into permanently tinkling telephones. Instead, they look a little thinner and a little strained. Something fairly horrible is happening out there, and estate agents, like rifle-toting teenage volunteers in 1914, are right in the frontline.
The ones I've met have spent a lot of time grimacing and folding their hands like priests; cast, as they now are, as the curators of doubt and misery. You hear a lot of rumours about the housing market – but the reality is that, inside those hopefully for-sale-boarded homes, there is a tangible sense of fear and misery, and it is hard to imagine it won't get worse.
I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me personally: I decided to move house for ludicrously self-indulgent reasons, such as not particularly liking where I lived. This is lesson one: don't go anywhere. Don't do anything. Life no longer looks like it used to in reggae-soundtracked adverts for home loans, where moving house is a matter of re-styling as much as relocation. Instead, there appears to be a kind of mass fiscal arm-wrestle going on. The last helicopter is leaving Saigon, and lots of people who thought there was such a thing as a housing "ladder" – a ladder that always goes up, rather than toppling down a ravine while their legs pump uselessly, Wile E Coyote-style – are starting to think there won't be room inside for everyone.
The latest figures, on the face of it, don't look too alarming. The average value of a UK home fell by 0.9% in August, the third successive month of decline. Now 0.9% is a fairly un-scary number – the kind of number that, from the outside, you can frown over dimly then just sort of ignore. But let me clutch you with my skinny hand and fix you with my Ancient Mariner stare and tell you what I've seen, if not exactly behind the figures, then in and around them.
Fear stalks the plantation-shuttered suburbs. There is a tangible sense of some horrible tipping point being reached. People are still moving, but they seem to be moving only because of bad things. On my visits, the Divorce House has become a grisly recurrent private joke (the unmown lawn, the brave faces . . .). Desperate price slashes are common: the top-spec dream home hurled on to the bonfire of the Just Reduced and the Keen to Sell. Even among the ranks of baby boomers, complacently touting their unmortgaged goldmine, there is a sense of pinched and disbelieving affront. I know of three cases of estate agents angrily abused by their economically immobilised clients. (How long before we see security grilles in agents' offices, and those signs that say "Our staff have the right not to suffer violence or abuse", which immediately make you want to abuse someone violently?)
It may be hard to feel sorry for the post-boom-era house vendor. Why should we pity the privileged as their swag-bag of future-proof riches is marginally tithed and diminished? Even in my south London suburb, prices are inflated beyond the reach of most people. But this is still a little unfair. House-price money may be largely imaginary – bank-bound, tied up in value estimates and equity balances – but the anxiety is real. Home-owners suffer, too.
And these people at the middle of this deflating housing bubble are hardly to blame for its existence. They, too, feel duped. I had an epiphany the other day, when I met The Best Estate Agent Ever. A man who was blessed with a child-like far-sightedness. "I've been going into these houses for years," he said, as we mooched around some price-slashed, buzz-free, distinctly non-hot vessel of human misery. "They go in and rip everything out. It is absolute consumerism. We are the generation McDonald's was marketing at 30 years ago. Not surprising we've ended up like this. Lovely coving there. Chipped."
It is this practice of recreational house-moving that has now come to a stop. The sense that you have a duty to upscale and upgrade, that growth and expansion are inevitable, and things will just keep getting better and more valuable. Recreational house-moving was a factor in the boom of the Blair years. Unlike him, it has now disappeared.
We are left, instead, with an insidiously spreading damp-stain of house-bound anguish. Perhaps we can even begin to feel sympathy for the estate agent. Some estimates suggest 4,000 of them will be made redundant before the recession is through. In their latest incarnation – chastened, derided carriers of bad news – those that remain might even end up being your only companion through an increasingly hazy and frightening underworld.
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