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Yes, go for it.
Beware of the risks but remember in the worst case you will still have somewhere to live. The only way to survive serious negative equity is to stay where you are, take in lodgers if you have to.
I can't agree with all your analysis.Fundamentally, the housing market is about supply and demand, because everyone needs somewhere to live.
Is not true. Like it or not the housing market is all about speculative investment. For a couple of decades now property has been the best place to store your wealth and get a better return than anywhere else. That has been overheated by £billions of foreign cash coming in, looking for somewhere to hide.
There is a slight risk of a big collapse, but in that case the government will have to do something to protect millions of people like you. And also to protect the banks that depend on your mortgage payments. So hang in there and don't panic.
Charlie_L-
Like it or not the housing market is all about speculative investment
Not really true either, I don't think. Even though large numbers of people have been investing in the market speculatively , most of the houses they bought are still lived in. Ok, so there's a very, very small number of "buy-to-leave" properties kept empty — but even if these were all sold, my guess is that there would still be more people wanting to live in London than there are houses available for them.
Diamond_Supercool
Given that I'm days away from pouring all my savings into a house in London, I'm trying hard to stay optimistic about house prices. I recognise that there are plenty of reasons to be fearful, but here are my reasons for optimism...
What really screws the property market is uncertainty. There is loads of uncertainty at the moment, hence the very slow market, hence the price drops. Once Brexit happens, the economy will probably not totally implode, and after a year or two, things will have settled down one way or another, uncertainty will start to dissipate and the market will pick up again.
Fundamentally, the housing market is about supply and demand, because everyone needs somewhere to live. Given that the government is likely to miss housebuilding targets for 2022 by anywhere upwards of 50,000 homes (possibly much more), demand will almost certainly continue to outstrip supply. A LOT of people need to move out of London before there is a surplus of houses and therefore a massive drop in demand.
If anywhere in the UK is going to be insulated from the impact of Brexit, it is likely to be London. It seems unlikely that vast numbers of people are going to flood out of London, buying houses in the provinces instead.
As the saying goes: property gets sick but it never dies. And the London property market has been a solid investment for about 2,000 years. It may slip a little in the short term, but it's probably still a safer asset in the medium term than, say, Apple. Or Bitcoin. Or Foffa bicycles.
Interest rates are unlikely to rise dramatically over the next few years. At least according to recent noises from the Bank of England. While interest rates stay low(ish), mortgages are affordable, which keeps the housing market relatively buoyant.
Fuck it: this house is meant to be a nice place for me to live, not some kind of speculative investment.