House prices will boom before crashing in 2026

Spotted by TBH in The Daily Mail (of all places):

Anybody predicting the average house price would rise 10 per cent during the lockdowns would probably have been laughed out of the room as the pandemic hit… If the Bank of England and the property industry itself isn’t capable of predicting the future of house prices, who then would be bold enough to do so?

He is able to make these predictions having identified an 18-year cycle that he has mapped out from hundreds of years’ worth of data.

As much as I love Fred, that’s not quite true. The oldest article I found about the 18-year boom bust cycle was circa 1905, which covered US recessions going back to before it was even the US. But he certainly rediscovered this phenomenom.

What would stop a crash from happening in 2026?

‘Nothing can stop the crash of 2026, other than if prices were limited to long-run affordable levels, but governments refuse to contemplate that prospect,’ he says, ‘If people are happy with the booms and busts, there doesn’t need to be a solution.’

The best ‘solution’ according to Fred and many others being to tax land values a lot more and labour and enterprise a lot less, of course, but it’s The Mail and they didn’t report that.