I am staggered by house prices in the UK. Quite 4 or 5 times what they cost in Cape Town and 6 to 8 times what they cost in Johannesburg for similar accommodation (house 150 sqm, plot 1000 sqm)
Quite simply the housing market is a measure of desirability of a country as a place to live and how strong the economy is- just capitalist market forces at work. House prices in Sydney probably make UK houses look like a bargain.
In the UK people used to save money with institutions called Mutual Building Societies (owned by their customers), who were very careful to vet people who applied for a mortgage to make sure they could afford it, to protect their other savers hard earned money, it was rare to get a loan more than 2.5 to 3x your annual salary (which effectively kept a cap on house prices). Then these institutions were allowed to de-mutualize and buy out their shareholders (savers) with offers of 30 pieces of silver, and then became banks, and major banks were also allowed into housing market now banks lent (some say deliberately) large sums money to people who could never afford to pay it back (which stoked up housing market to unsustainable levels), some lending was up to 120% of (the already inflated) property value and 6 or 7 times peoples salaries as the banks gambled on soaring property prices to make a fast Buck when buyers defaulted and they repossessed and sold properties - when the bubble burst and larger banks realized their gamble had failed they unloaded these toxic mortgages bundled up with a few good ones to other unsuspecting banks, and that is how the crash of 2008 happened, and we are still suffering for it today.
Having large banks in the mortgage market changed a house from somewhere to live and raise a family into a money making commodity to be bought and sold for maximum profit, and government regulators seemed to be sleeping in the same bed as the banks while the market failed and many people lost all their savings.
