Ben Lowry: The last Northern Ireland housing boom was disaster, and we need to beware a repeat of it

Since then they have slowly risen by 50%.

That takes them back to where they were, right?

Well not quite, as anyone who was keen on maths at school might remember.

The percentage changes relate to two very different baseline figures.

Thus a fall of 50% from 100 units takes you down to 50 units and a rise of 50% from 50 units takes you to 75 units. In other words, you are still 25 units or 25% down.

That is more or less what has happened to property prices in the Province (it is a little bit more complicated than that and the web version of this article has some more statistics on what has happened, see below).

The key thing to know is that Ireland — both sides of the border — had one of the biggest house price collapses in recorded economic history.

The boom of 2006 and 2007 was a disaster, yet most of society colluded in it.

Young people who borrowed ruinous amounts of money to get on the housing ladder were told by the elders and betters: ‘You can’t go wrong with property.’

Many of those people are still in negative equity, 14 years later.

In many respects those young buyers were given bad advice for good reasons — older folk wanted to reassure the younger generation that owning your home is a good and safe thing to do, which it had been for generations of people.

But there is also a lot of stupidity and greed when it comes to housing booms.

Soaring prices become like a pyramid scheme in which the people at the top get the gains, and the people at the bottom are left with a huge bill when it all collapses — as it inevitably will.

Northern Ireland had never had a house price crash prior to 2007 so our failure to see disaster was all the more understandable.

But I had moved into a flat in London in 1995, at the bottom of the then housing market in the capital, which was worth 30% less than it had been when the owner had purchased the property in the 1988 boom.

When I moved out in 1998 it had still not recovered its value, a decade after it had been bought. I never forgot that lesson.

In June 2007 I wrote an article warning that Northern Ireland house prices were dangerously over valued compared to average incomes. I mentioned what had happened in Tokyo after its boom of 1989, where prices had not fully recovered 18 years later.

Sure enough prices in NI plunged, ruining many people and businesses.

Some of those who lost out had been greedy, and had speculated on buying many rental properties in the hope of making ever expanding gains.

It is not good for society if such speculators always win, because it means that a large percentage of the housing stock falls into a small number of owners, and thus it makes it harder for younger people on modest incomes to own their own home, and so to feel that they have a stake in their community.

Even so, few people deserve financial ruin, however grasping they might have been.

As house prices fell and fell and fell between 2008 and 2013, I wrote extensively about it. I was accused of being ‘negative’ about the housing market and of talking prices down.

But I feel that, on the contrary, politicians and civic leaders failed to speak out about the boom when it happened, and failed to warn people of the dangers. I felt that they also failed to talk candidly about the bust, and so to learn lessons from it.

We are now in the grip of very significant house price rises, but we are still well short of the 2007 peak. In any event, if prices returned to 2007 levels they would still be 40% down in real terms, because of general inflation since then.

Also, we can take comfort from the fact that we are not alone. Places such as Canada and southern England are also booming. Covid has made people think about their priorities, which include having a nice home.

But we should not forget that almost no-one benefits from housing booms. Childless people who can downsize do, as do mass property investors, as do people who can sell up and move abroad to a country that is still cheap.

But almost no-one else does. Fist time buyers suffer, as mentioned above, as do people moving up the ladder, who have to pay more because the gap between their home and the one they want to buy costs more than it did.

Older parents whose home has soared in value might think they gain but don’t if they have to help their grown up offspring to buy a house.

I do not want to sound too righteous about people who do well out of property. After all, it would be a very unusual person who bought a house at a very good time, made a fortune out of it, and then felt bad about such gains.

But I am struck by something the estate agent and RICS spokesman Samuel Dickey says in our paper today: “We don’t want to get into a situation again where there is a peak then a trough.”

Estate agents were often accused of talking up the market before the 2007 boom, and there is no doubt that many of them did. But they were very badly bruised by the subsequent collapse.

We are not, as explained above and below, in 2007 territory. And the significant rises in recent years have given some belated comfort to people who made a disastrous home purchase at the peak, and few people would begrudge that.

But southern England, and indeed Vancouver, where an old school pal of mine lives, show the problems with sustained housing booms, where prices never fall.

People, like my teacher friend, are shut out of ownership and many of them can become upset about it, and that can manifest itself in support for radical political change, that — at its mildest — seeks to heavily tax existing homeowners.

• Some basic statistics as to what has happened

When I wrote about the house price crash between 2008 and 2014, I kept a running average of a number of key house price surveys, including Nationwide, Halifax and the University of Ulster. By that measurement, prices fell a staggering 58% from a peak in mid 2007 to a low five or so years later (different surveys give different dates for the lowest point).

Since then prices have risen by about 50%, or perhaps now closer to 60%, but as explained above, that does not mean we have returned to 2007 levels — far from it.

According to the Land Registry, house prices in Northern Ireland peaked at £224,670 in the third quarter (summer) of 2007, fell 57% to their lowest point of £97,428 in the first quarter (winter) of 2013, and had risen by 53% to £149,178 in the first quarter of this year.

However, that most recent survey finding is before the spring and summer of this year, when there has been sharp bidding for many properties. The average price might well be closer to £160,000 than £150,000.

That suggests that prices are still around 30% below 2007 levels.

However, even if prices returned to nominal 2007 levels, they would still be sharply down. According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, general prices rose by 42% between 2007 and last year, the most recent year for which there is data.

In other words, if you bought a house in 2007 for £200,000, say, and sold it today for £200,000, you would still be out of pocket, because it would have had to rise to £284,000 to have kept pace with general inflation (as opposed to house price inflation).

The point is this: not only can you ‘go wrong’ with property, if you buy at the height of a housing boom you might have to wait decades to get your full money back, if indeed you ever do.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter acting editor

• Ben Lowry Aug 2: Three points to keep in mind when arguing against the NI Protocol

Other articles by Ben Lowry below, and beneath that information on how to subscribe to the News Letter:

• Ben Lowry July 24: Republican terror atrocities are increasingly being partly blamed on the security forces

• Ben Lowry July 24: Hot weather ought to be welcome in NI but this is extreme

• Ben Lowry July 17: UK has tipped into an amnesty after a long approach to IRA that lacked bite

• Ben Lowry July 15: We should be honest as to how we have arrived at a Troubles amnesty 


• Ben Lowry July 10: We will find soon if UK is for once going to criticise Ireland

• Ben Lowry July 10: I once always wanted England to lose, now I want them to win

• Ben Lowry July 3: The mild DUP response to the protocol will cause Boris little concern

• Ben Lowry July 3: The extreme heat in Canada shows why we might come to like Northern Ireland’s mild weather

• Ben Lowry June 26: Neither Dublin nor IRA have been put under any pressure on legacy

• Ben Lowry June 26: A slight sense of sadness as the days again begin to shorten

• Ben Lowry June 19: Somehow the appeasement of Sinn Fein got worse

• Ben Lowry June 12: Now above all, when unionists are winning the argument on the Protocol, is time to stand firm against it

• Ben Lowry June 5: It is clear that Edwin Poots is not taking the DUP in a remotely hardline direction

• Ben Lowry May 29: There is much confusion in unionism, so here are some suggested core pro Union principles

• Ben Lowry May 22: Instead of ‘moving on’ from IRA funeral, we still need proper answers

• Ben Lowry May 22: If Joel Keys, 19, wants to help unionism he should get a law degree

• Ben Lowry May 15: Edwin Poots and Doug Beattie will offer two distinct shades of unionism

• Ben Lowry May 8: Formal UK ideas for an amnesty are almost exactly 20 years old

• Ben Lowry May 8: Let us hope that the brilliant Eoghan Harris keeps on writing

• Ben Lowry May 1: Unionism can’t just be about managing long-term defeat

• Ben Lowry May 1: Arlene Foster was given huge opportunity by DUP after her exit helped ruin UUP

• Ben Lowry April 24: NI seems to rely increasingly on just one pollster for data on attitudes to a border poll

• Ben Lowry April 17: DUP still has to choose between managing this disaster or total rejection of it

• Ben Lowry April 10: His enduring marriage to the Queen was key to our understanding of Prince Philip

• Ben Lowry April 3: Radio grilling of UUP leader exposed folly of unionists blaming Simon Byrne for funeral

• Ben Lowry Mar 27: There should not be an Irish language act, but it is too late — the DUP has agreed one

• Ben Lowry Mar 20: We have made it through the worst of the dark, dreaded winter lockdown

• Ben Lowry Mar 20: MLAs lost control of abortion by rejecting modest law reform

• Ben Lowry Mar 13: Whatever future Boris Johnson adopts for Northern Ireland seems set to lead to a crisis

• Ben Lowry Mar 13: Scotland tunnel isn’t fantasy, but something kids of today might see

• Ben Lowry Mar 6: The cost of victims’ pension has ballooned without explanation as to why 


• Ben Lowry Feb 27: Unionists have fully turned against Irish Sea border because they’ve seen the scale of disaster

• Ben Lowry Feb 20: We still lack answers as to why IRA funeral got special treatment at Roselawn

• Ben Lowry Feb 13: Peter Robinson has long experience of what is and is not politically feasible

• Ben Lowry Feb 6: There is barely any unionist support for violence, despite justified anger at sea border

• Ben Lowry Jan 30: At last, clear reason for UK and unionists to stop being weak towards Ireland/EU

• Ben Lowry Jan 23: Lockdown sceptics have been undermined by crazy theories, but sensible criticisms haven’t gone away

• Ben Lowry Jan 16: The Irish Sea border was imposed because UK knew unionists would take it

• Ben Lowry in 2020: Last night unionists celebrated a move towards Irish unity

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