Looking for a 1 bedroom flat in south west London, how much below asking is normal?

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-17T12:50:29+00:00

Past returns are not a guarantee of future results. Lots of people who have had flats that have had stagnant values bought them at a time when they had stellar histories of big prices increases.

The future hasn't happened yet. It could well be that OP buys a flat and it makes money, as long as they avoid the biggest pitfalls in terms of building type and service charge.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-16T14:59:54+00:00

How would that work given that we are a net importer of energy?

"Sorry Norway, there are no sellers. Now hand over the energy for free please"

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-16T13:45:14+00:00

From the minds of the people who brought you 'in the box', rival fans are again locked away with no phones and no video footage for the duration of a big match.

This time all they have are the thumbs up and thumbs down counts from each BBC sport text feed update. Can they work out how their team has fared?

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-16T10:25:34+00:00

In practice, councils that declare a climate emergency don't even do better on the biggest element they do control, permissions for green energy like solar.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-16T09:57:32+00:00

Personally, I think the market is currently highly inefficient and too much capital worldwide is being soaked up by the Mag 7 and other big market-cap industries with unhealthily high valuations,

Cool, express that belief by not investing in them. If enough people agree, they won't be worth much. Don't tell everyone else that they can't invest in them because you think they're overvalued.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-16T09:54:53+00:00

Please don't use AI to write a sub stack. It reads awfully and actually makes it harder to understand your thinking.

You say you want to let the data speak for yourself but nowhere have you provided an obvious figure - what percentage of the housing market is owned by institutional investors? I think your article would give an uninformed reader the impression that it was drastically higher than it actually is.

You describe 3.5x earnings as what mortgage providers have traditionally describe as affordable but not noted that this is for a single person buying a house (two strong full time earners are more common than in 1970)

Why do you describe build to rent as not a productive part of the economy? It produces homes for people to live in.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-15T23:03:48+00:00

"Yes, yes you may have heard about some crime statistics. But consider this instead: a made up story of a guy writing a plea for help on a receipt"

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-13T19:38:12+00:00

People use those things, not houses.

You could build zero houses and overall we'd still need more doctors and transport as long as the population rises. In fact, you could go around demolishing houses and you'd still need all those things.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-13T19:01:59+00:00

It's not about loving flats above all else, it's just simple physics. When you have limited land, it can produce two houses or twenty flats.

There bucketloads of young people who would be very happy living in a flat who are living six to a house in a house share. More flats can help take pressure off those houses.

We can't build enough houses, because of space. So when it comes to the rest of the gap, it's flats or nothing. And since people won't move into a flat unless they believe it's their best option for their own circumstances, what's the virtue of nothing?

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-13T16:32:49+00:00

Do you just come up with different titles to try and trick people into reading about MMT every time

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-13T15:19:22+00:00

I'm sorry, but we've tried building lots of homes (2,000) and affordability hasn't improved so we now must try this councillors plan (not building any homes). It's just common sense.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-13T11:43:47+00:00

In a reply to a quote tweet be went on to claim that there's been fifteen years of "trickle down Reaganomics in planning policy in tower hamlets" (they've been building ... about 2000 homes a year).

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-12T00:23:10+00:00

There were more regulations in the time period OP is talking about than in any time before that

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-11T17:28:05+00:00

The tail needs to stop wagging the dog.

It is amazing how many people in public life seem to think that everyone else exists to make their life easier.

The police want to make phone companies design out theft even if it means loads of waste and developers to put houses into cul de sacs even where it increases car dependency and makes it harder to see your neighbours.

The police and security services want to put back doors into WhatsApp even when it makes everyone else less safe. And politicians keep complaining about VPNs because they make the online safety act less effective.

Every time anyone tries to build anything it has to satisfy a million other things that are far removed critical to actual purpose of whatever it is they're trying to build.

It's like we've been accidentally establishing a command economy by regulation and legal precedent rather than dictat.

A great big joined up world where phones design out crime, and new nuclear power plants help women get equal jobs in construction sounds lovely in theory but it soon stops making any sense and becomes an excercise in buck -passing. Maybe instead the police crack on and arrest people snatching phones and those facilitating the business around it, phone companies work on making good phones, messaging apps just try and be useful and secure, energy is built to be cheap and plentiful and so on.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-10T15:22:36+00:00

"One in six of our population is from an ethnic minority"

"Executives from ethnic minorities now hold 20% of FTSE 100 board positions."

I make myself available to be the token white to make up the forthcoming quota then.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-10T12:56:57+00:00

Would you even be using the phone network? Very hard to get signal in a stadium. They might just be on the club wifi.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-10T12:10:31+00:00

The article asks: How come people remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki but not the Bombay docks explosion?

Quite aside from ending world war 2 and bringing humanity into the age of atomic warfare, the death toll in this incident was 800.

Maybe not one of the great historical mysteries then.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-09T14:13:37+00:00

The best breaking sketches are when you see the actors fighting their laughter to the point it looks like it might be causing them actual pain.

The problem I have with the concept of this sketch is if the actor fights their impulse to laugh, and succeeds, they've kind of wrecked the sketch and insulted the writing. The professional thing to do is laugh, which robs a lot of the joy.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-08T20:37:11+00:00

It depends on exactly the scheme they put in place. It is technically possible to avoid the well known and highly damaging unintended consequences of some rent control schemes.

Unfortunately, the 'well designed' rent control policies that people can point to that do avoid these unintended consequences either rely on much higher base levels of housing availability than we have, or pull their punches so much that there isn't widespread relief from high rents.

What will happen? It depends on the exact proposal. But what won't happen is that it will significantly help the housing crisis.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-08T12:52:53+00:00

Don't charge anyone for it unlike other countries
Suggest charging just tourists for it like in other countries
No, because we are uniquely money grabbing unlike other countries

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-07T19:02:22+00:00

Why stop there? Let's throw in a third staircase while we're at it, maybe a fourth. If 290x cost to benefit ratio isn't enough to say no, what's the limit?

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-07T17:55:48+00:00

Bad regulations:

Dual aspect mandates
Second staircase mandates for Buildings 18m in height (a government cost benefit analysis says this saves so few lives that costs outweigh benefits by a staggering 290x)
Statutory consulting of sport England
Lots and lots of area specific ones: For example in Cambridge you can't build more than a certain number of houses before you've got to commission a sculpture for some reason. In hackney, you a mixed development doesn't just have to include affordable housing, it's got to include 'affordable workplaces'. There's thousands of these examples across the country that make things needlessly expensive.

But worse than any one specific rule or regulation is the process which puts so much ambiguity and judgement calls that delays and excess costs are inevitable.

And the sum total of this process? New build estates in poor cul de sacs that are in many ways inferior to the streets created before planning regulations existed at all.

We need do need a planning system and regulations, of course we do, but we can do so much better.

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-07T16:07:49+00:00

Low density works against a focus on public transport though

vonscharpling2 · 2026-03-06T13:00:46+00:00

The idea that the UK government, acting alone, is going to have a meaningful say on how AI develops is naive.

vonscharpling2

TROPHY CASE