The overwhelming majority of attendees, made up of estate agents, lenders, advisers and other property financing professionals, held their hands up when asked if they expected a housing boom would occur within the next 10 years.
Despite the audience’s view panel member Hugh Pym, the BBC’s chief economics correspondent, said that he did not expect the housing market to return to the levels seen in 2007 over the next couple of decades.
He said less volatile house price inflation was probably better for the economy as first-time buyers were priced out of the market while the UK was in the midst of a housing shortage.
Another panel member Yolande Barnes, director of residential research at Savills, said that there would not be a return to “old normality”.
Instead Barnes proposed that the lettings market would take on a much larger role in the housing landscape.
Paul Lewis, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s MoneyBox and “voice of the consumer”, said that consumers had become foolishly buoyed on by the idea that they live in a fortune.
He said: “Sellers are now holding on to their properties for longer as they’re not receiving the asking price they believe it is worth.
“Consumers should be looking at houses as somewhere to live in not as an investment.”
The audience expected house prices either to rise or remain flat at an even 50:50 split.
One attendee said he believed that house prices would decline.
