...and do gold investment companies put you and your family up once you've sold your gaff and turned it into gold> Back in the real world..... Mick I think your a bit delusional about the solidity of the uk housing market, at the top we are going to run out of rich bankers, footballers etc etc with the resolve or even need to buy up any more property, and at the bottom young middleclass Londoners (forget anyone else even having a vague chance) will be faced with graduate fees, increased direct and indirect taxation and the growing realisation that they'll have bugger all to retire on meaning that they won't be able or as keen to put down deposits ..the FTBuyers market is drying up - ask people trying to sell flats in ED -, the huge increases in property that have helped mere mortals who don't work in the city but were lucky enough to take the first step on the ladder when it was vaguely in touch with reality, and have benneffoited from a massive asset increase which has at helped them move up to next stage has now gone leaving the majority of even well paid people who don't own way, way behind....we'll end (and are ending up) with a growing number of empty nesters trying to offload their houses to a load of young families squashed up in smaller non-family flats that they can't get rid off.....in the end prices will fall. You just can't keep finding people with the ?100,000k 10% deposits and ?250,000k joint annual income to buy ?1.2 million houses in what is, after all, a pleasant but not that spectatcular suburb in SE London. We are the only country whose property bubble hasn't burst...although its unwound a bit but I still believe it's very possible and certainly the period of massive accumulation of wealth by holding property has gone (until another crash takes us below long term 'sensible' prices - personally, I think the best you can hope for is static and probably small falls in nominal prices, which is a decline in real terms. This is aside from the wider position and fact that it's being propped up by QE etc long enough for our banks to rebuild their asset positions and recaptilise before a slump completlet buggers up their balance sheets.....in some ways this is not a bad thing in stopping catastrophe 2 years ago but you can't beat market forces for ever....