From an article on George Osborne’s “Help to Buy” scheme...

[randomness]

...this chart, with data from Torsten Slok at Deutsche Bank, comparing house price to income ratios in selected American, Australian, British, Canadian, Irish, and New Zealand cities.


(click to enlarge)
From http://www.bondvigilantes.com/blog/2013/07/10/first-home-owner-grants-a-gift-to-new-home-buyers-or-existing/:

The UK’s Help to Buy scheme will take two forms. The first part will offer buyers that qualify an interest-free loan (up to £120,000) from the Government. The second part will see the Government act as guarantor for a proportion of the borrower’s debt.

Well, that's one way to pump up a housing bubble market!

(achinhibitor, the post will probably interest you.)

Comments

[frotz.livejournal.com]

Sure thing! I'm a bit leery of using these numbers for specific comparisons, but I suspect the economists are at least on top of it. (At least, I've never gotten around to reading the original Case-Schiller-Weiss paper.) Still, the US "Metropolitan Statistical Area" definitions that are being applied here are huuuuuuge, and while on the one hand it does seem essential to try and capture the entire economic cross-section of the area, these are also capturing large swaths of territory that I don't think many people think of as being part of the core housing market.

There's also the question of how useful it is to look at house sale prices in a market like NYC where there's a whole lot of the population that rents (and wouldn't ever think about doing anything else) vs. places where there's a lot more of an ownership culture.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Sure. I notice the numbers aren't actually comparable, but they give some ballpark comparison.

It's particularly useful to see how far out of whack Vancouver and Sydney look.