My performance – October 2016. Carney-gate abated.

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The month began with the Conservative party annual conference, and the aftershocks were still being felt as the month ended.  The prime minister sounded much more pro ‘hard’ Brexit than the markets had expected, and the home secretary was willfully misquoted by everybody – especially overseas – as saying that UK companies would have to publish lists of their foreign workers.

From an investing point of view the main impact arose from May’s critique of quantitative easing:

“People with assets have got richer. People without them have suffered. People with mortgages have found their debts cheaper. People with savings have found themselves poorer….. A change has got to come.” – Theresa May, UK Prime Minister, October 2016

Lest you wondered whether the change needed is the Government’s problem or the central bank’s problem, William Hague (a former Tory leader) helpfully clarified the next day that the Bank of England’ ‘days of independence could be numbered’ unless its policies change. If this didn’t look like political interference, what would? This, after all, was from the party which strongly opposed giving the Bank of England independence back in 1997.

Just as I was beginning to contemplate whether we might be in for a full-on Sterling crisis if Mark Carney, the foreign Bank of England governor, decided he’d had enough, the latest news is that he will be staying until mid 2019. Hopefully the Tories have seen into the abyss and will step back from it.  Carney may not be perfect but there is no better anywhere in the world and right now losing him would be a big mistake.

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My Dream Home: the story after

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Readers earlier in the year will be aware that I found myself buying my Dream Home, on something of a whim, at very short notice in January. My plan had been to put the old house on the market last Easter. Things haven’t gone entirely to plan, as I’ll recount.

First off the old house needed a bit of TLC. Nothing major, but not something I have to bother with on my other valuable assets. This took a few weeks, and prevented me selling the house at the start of the year.

Secondly, I got quite a significant shock when I got the house valued. This being London, the first and almost only step required to value a house in a given postcode is to measure its square footage. Measuring is a very slick process these days involving lasers. But I couldn’t believe my eyes when I got the plans back : they were 500 sq ft short. Shurely shome mishtake? Alas not. I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension for about fifteen years about the size of my old house.

500 sq ft in North London is worth over half a million squids so this was quite a blow. In many ways I’m glad I hadn’t realised this when I was looking at new houses, but I’m certainly relieved I didn’t stretch myself to buy a more expensive Dream Home. Certainly it is a good reminder of one of life’s most important lessons: Check Your Assumptions.

In any case I then had a few of the local agents visit to tell me how wonderful my house is, how exorbitant expensive it will be and how rapidly they can sell it for me. My original strategy was to deploy two agents who between them covered all three of the UK’s large property portals but in the end I ended up with a ‘pile it high’ agent and a ‘classy one man band’ agent both of whom were on the same two portals (Zoopla/PrimeLocation being the one that matters in my market).

The pricing of a house to sell is a fascinating process.

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