8 November 08 - Property

Could be a pundit on the market. Have taken to checking prices of property sold over the past 8 years and it's quite a satisfying game to find the same flat or house in xx street sold in 2000, then 2003 (not much difference in price) then 2005, still not much difference, and then the massive spike of 06/07. Prices are going down but I'm bying and I want to buy at 2005 levels. Only vendors still seem to be in some delusional cloud and hanging on to 06 prices, 07 are a distant dream. In such fashion I found the house of an ex lover, who bought it last year in October for £1.3m from someone who in January of same year ie. 07, had paid £690k for it. Now, he may well added rooms, a swimming pool, a garage for all I know but boy, did he make a killing in 9 months! Why don't I have any seed money to speculate in such fashion? What a game. My ex who bought at £1.3m has no intention of moving, getting married next year and is extra loaded anyway but isn't that just.. funny.

My lender seems to downgrade my property price by £20k every ten days or so for the purpose of getting a loan against it. Makes me mad. It's totally one of the 'computer says no' type situations. They just use the postcode, no visuals or visits required. This in turns causes me some problems as to how to find the remaining money I need since nobody wants to take into account for example my cunning plan of getting a friend to pay me a grand a month for a consultancy fee/job for a year. Only permanent job remuneration counts these days. Where is the bradford and bingley when you need it.

The inner stress caused by my constant monitoring of prices, and the calculations I seem to endlessly make, are sending me spinning. For example, if I get loaned 200k and don't use it immediately for purchase, I wanted to know from my bank how much they would pay me in interest for the deposit for a month. Simple no? Ah, no. The call centre guy can only tell me the percentages but cannot work out the actual amounts. For that I have to go to the branch. Isn't it funny though that when I opened that deposit account they promised 6% gross and now am being told i'd get max 4%. Since when do they get to make all these changes willy nilly? BASTARDS.

I need to go sit in a tent in the desert to stop thinking about all this shit which is frankly too boring to be part of my life. I want just sex and rock 'n' roll (Tiga not coming to the End on 4 December soon enough) and travel. That's why I work. Not to worry about Kensington prices still holding up when north london is crashing. Shame I refuse to go live in some huge house in Lewisham as those are going for a song or £300k to be precise. But let me go see what their prices were in 2004!

God I am utterly boring myself... Someone stop me! or give me £100k interest free for a couple of years. That's not asking much.