100% mortgage backed by BOMAD? I’ve seen this movie before – it didn’t end well

Rich kids will get to bid up house prices aided and abetted by BOMAD¹ and a Lloyds bank 100% mortgage. BOMAD are on the hook for defaulting rich rugrats in the first three years, then Lloyds bank should be OK with the equity said kids² have built up in those three years. Let’s hope Brexit doesn’t make the housing market go titsup, eh?

No, actually scratch that. I wish exactly that. I have no sympathy for these featherbedded chillun – let them suck up the negative equity, and let BOMAD be rocked for a chunk of the debt as a useful playing-field levelling action. Bring it on.

Perhaps after that’s happened some other poor devils will get to afford a house, should they be fortunate enough to still have a job in post-Brexitland.

BOMAD-backed mortgages are tough luck for kids who don’t have well-heeled  parents, because, natch, the rich kids will bid up house prices. So we can understand the delightful sentiment behind Frank Field’s letter to the Grauniad which proposes extending the largesse of the 100% mortgage to all those who don’t have access to BOMAD. Bless your egalitarian cotton socks Frank me old mucker, but you happen to be older than I am. So how come in your 76 turns around the sun you haven’t noticed yet that if you subsidise people’s mortgages, what happens? House prices go up. The maths is simple.

Punters have £x they can spend on housing, and in general when you are young an inexperienced as to the vicissitudes of financial life you deploy all of that £x, because everybody around you tells you that you can’t lose with housing. You also don’t tend to have much capital behind you and are in the first part of your working life, so your earnings are limited. You’re running on empty once you’ve committed your £x to the rapacious maw that is UK residential property. There are no reserves. If you’re £x is more than someone else’s you soak it up by having more house or living in one of the more tony districts, or reducing the zone on your London Underground ticket if you are rich enough to buy in the Great Wen.

The market is set by some punters finding their £x just ain’t enough to own where they want to live, so they leave the market for the rapacious BTL rental market, reducing demand of housing to buy. So, Frank, you go and subsidise that buyer’s £x by £y allowing these folk to borrow more than they can actually afford, guess what happens? Prices rise by £y, or if you subsidise mortgages by £y, by the increase they can borrow with that extra £y, which is a lot more. Result misery. This is an area that needs tough love because of the law of unintended consequences.

We’ve been here before. MIRAS, Help to buy³, LISAs. Get the government the hell out of the home loans market and keep it out of it, nail their feet to the floor. That includes you, Frank. Sure, BOMAD ain’t fair and the rich will screw everybody else. See also: private schools, moving to catchment areas, the lot. If you have the money you will always shit on other people’s kids to get yours ahead.

Government – stay out of the home loans biz. Get into the house building biz

The government can do something about housing – build the bloody things as social housing, don’t subsidise the buying of houses. Leave that to the market. Fewer that half of British households can afford to buy a house IMO. It’s a tremendously expensive capital asset that sucks up roughly 6-10 years of your gross earned income⁴, and in earlier generations before 1979 we catered for these people with something called council housing.

Let’s not over-romanticise that – some council housing was ghastly, I remember playing on some of the elevated walkway council estates as a kid where some friends lived, and they were dire. Council houses were often terrific, though, particularly for families – far more space than the typical four bedroom premium executive detached-in-name-only⁵ rabbit hutch constructed now.

Typical taste bypass of a modern estate aimed at those with more money than taste, this one in Turkey. Someone’s missing the whole point of a castle, these ones are definitely DINO. A castle should be 10 miles from the nearest one 😉

The government should stay out of the homes loans biz. Totally, other than to regulate charlatans, minimum lending standards, and to deny BTL lending totally IMO. I’ve nothing against private landlords, if they really own their properties. If they are competing for mortgages with homebuyers, well we survived perfectly well without BTL mortgages up to 1994 and nothing about the British housing or rental market has gone in the right direction since then for the poor bastards that have to live in the properties.

If the government wants to do something about housing, then look to the days before Thatcher screwed it all up to buy votes giving away free money to council tenants with Right To Buy. They were council tenants because they weren’t rich enough to buy their homes, and 40% of these houses are now in private BTL hands, shitting on the generations after. Thanks, Thatch.

We could roll this back  – build social housing, which we used to call council housing, and employ the best lawyers in the land to place a perpetual restrictive covenant on council housing so that any politician that even thinks of doing a Thatcher Right to Buy to sell them for votes is threatened with an official summons to be put in the stocks at the Tower of London to be pelted with eggs by everybody that can’t afford to buy a house until they think better of it.

In other news, personal insolvencies reach a seven-year high and household spending is at a 13 year high often fuelled by credit or depleting savings. Just the sort of situation that absolutely calls for 100% mortgages , natch?

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1. That’s Bank of Mum and Dad if you are one of the lowlife oiks that don’t happen to have mater and pater with the odd 10% of your starter house kicking around in loose cash they don’t need for three years. ↩
2. In the curmudgeonly Ermine worldview you’re still a kid whatever chronological age you are if you are financially dependent on your parents. Paying your own way in the world was one of the key rites of passage to adulthood in my day. I do appreciate that such non-launched kids like to be called adults nowadays, but this is my narrative, so bite me ;) ↩
3. Help to buy was on new houses, FFS. Yer typical first time buyer isn’t rich enough to spaff their money on a new house, you whazzocks. This was straight bung from taxpayers to Dave’s housebuilder chums ↩
4. At a purchase multiple of say 5* one salary, and typical mortgage terms at typical multi-decadal British interest rates of ~ 6% means you pay about twice the capital sum over 25 years ↩
5. DINO is when there is separation of about two inches from one ‘detached’ house to another. You need a few feet to get away from your neighbour’s bad taste in rap and to keep your squealing grandchildren out of their beauty sleep. ↩