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Happy Friday again and thank you for subscribing to my newsletter.

Welcome to your weekly briefing on things affecting the housing market.

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This week’s top 5 housing market facts:

1. More than 30% of homes for sale in London are landlords selling up. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-donnell_btl-landlords-investing-activity-7400821036545626113-du8P

2. BBC QT panelist calls out the housing market problem and calls for social housebuilding https://x.com/soniasodha/status/1995802383150940484?s=46

3. Bank of England forced to ease banking restrictions to try and prop up economy with more bank lending https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/02/boe-capital-rules-banks-growth-bank-of-england-stress-tests

4. Steepest downturn in UK construction on record so far, excluding pandemic. https://www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/PressRelease/52b275735e86497fa939b995db8961da

5. Bloomberg’s John Stepek is talking about house prices again and thinks they might go up in 2026. Meh. Maybe slightly at the FTB level outside London, but other than that I think it’s a stretch given the increasing tax burden and worsening employment outlook https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-12-04/money-distilled-no-respite-for-uk-home-buyers-as-affordability-remains-a-mirage

My Thought of the Week: The self-destructive politics of aspiring young homebuyers.

When I began the Moving Home with Charlie thing, I never envisaged having to spend so much time pushing back against a rising tide of misplaced economic discourse from would-be homeowners.

I get where they’re coming from. It’s never been harder or taken longer than now for young workers to scrape together the deposit and credit rating needed to buy a home. And don’t be fooled by the ‘improving affordability’ reports, they don’t factor in falling take-home income on which individual lending is based.

It must feel immensely unfair to them. They haven’t done anything to deserve this situation (no matter how much avocado toast they’ve eaten).

So it’s natural to look for someone to blame, someone to vent their anger at, and someone to ride to their rescue.

So, they’re blaming ‘the rich’, they’re angry at them, and they are lapping up any and all anti-rich rhetoric from political agitators like Gary Stephenson and Zack Polanski. (If you need a sign of how desperate and angry they are, check out Zack’s actual credentials, he’s not qualified for any serious political leadership). I also never imagined the Green party to go full blown commie on us either, but here we are.

Blame only ever lies squarely with policymakers. There are no individuals to blame for this situation. The rich getting richer is a result of policymaking, not greed. Everyone with savings large and small wants to get the best return they can on their money. No one wants to give their hard-got gains away. And why should anyone?

But, in my view, “the rich” have made a collective mistake over the last 30 years.

I grew up in wealthy, privileged surroundings. From a very early age I remember being taught that along with the privilege of wealth comes a responsibility, a personal one, to ensure that you use wealth to spread prosperity. Not charity, but to create opportunity, to create employment, careers, livelihoods for others.

Compared to the 70s and 80s, there has been a massive rise in the number of ‘wealthy’ people. When overall wealth is increasing, when living standards for all are rising, no one pays attention to the wealth gap, few people care about it.

But when times get tougher, those struggling and less well off will start to notice the wealthy more, and especially notice if that wealth is being hoarded and not gainfully deployed.

It’s not any government’s responsibility to decide how anyone should use their money, but it absolutely is up to government to create the conditions and environment to encourage the wealthy to invest in ventures that will spread opportunity and prosperity, and that’s where there’s been a failure.

So, policy failure number two is the failure to incentivise sufficient investment in job creation.

Both of these failures, on housing affordability and wealth inequality, can only be rectified with forward looking policies, not regressive “redistribution” policies.

You can’t use policies to turn back time or take anything. And even if you believe that the rich have taken from the poor, taking the money from the rich and giving it to government in the form of tax doesn’t help anyone, least of all the poor. The numbers don’t work.

There are only ways housing affordability gets better:

1. Lending multiples must stop being increased, and gradually reduced.

2. Social housing must be build until the government isn’t competing with people for homes, pushing up rents and yields and thus prices.

3. Wage growth must exceed house price growth.

The third one, wage growth, ONLY EVER happens when there is growth in the private sector. The private sector relies entirely on investment from the wealthy, and risk taking by the ambitious, to create growth, jobs and prosperity.

Being rich is better than being poor. It should be seen as a good thing, because it is. The more rich people there are (in volume) the fewer poor people there are, it’s that simple.

If our young have lost the drive and ambition to be wealthy, then we as a country have lost the ability to become wealthy, as a country.

I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of rich, greedy bastards. There are. But they aren’t all like that, and as long as they’re spending their money (which they always do) it’s good for the economy, jobs, wages and thus housing affordability.

Let’s not let the misguided but justified ire of the young turn into a self-harming disaster.

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In case you missed anything this week…

Nationwide says “House Prices are Up” but are they?

Q&A: Who’s moving now?

Most viewed post this week on X:

Most viewed video this week on TikTok:

@movinghomewithcharlie

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Have a great weekend, lots of love and luck to you all.

Charlie