Help to buy will just hinder efforts to solve the housing crisis
by Heather Stewart from on (#WSWQ)
The chancellor's measures will not help calm our mad property market. We need a radical change of policy
Drawing lessons about the real world of business from The Apprentice would be a mistake. But last week's vintage episode, in which the wannabe entrepreneurs flogged flats in London, carried a clear message about the capital's property market: it is now so unhinged that literally anyone can make money out of it.
It's hardly news that homes in London are not cheap, but the parade of buy-to-let cash purchasers who trooped in and out of the half-finished high-rise show flats, nodded sagely at the drivel from Lord Sugar's victims and signed on the dotted line, were flesh-and-blood representatives of a market gone mad.
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