Have to admit that I find this perspective on property baffling as an Australian. People here in SA act like its the end of the world if the market appears to flatten or a property takes a few weeks to sell. Not denying that a bubble could exist, but there are always tenants here and land is consistently in demand. The stories of doom are generally anchored to a glut in apartment development and/or Eastern states. Property with land is not so susceptible with ever-rising demand (immigration, investment properties, etc); e.g., my place is 750sqm, I demolished an older house and built new; within two years of buying, the land value alone was $100k up on the original purchase price.
In the UK, from the time a property is listed with an estate agent to the time conveyancing is completed can be on the order of several months, if not vastly more. It's not fast, especially because the buyer's and seller's lawyers doing the conveyancing take their sweet time to talk to each other, the surveys take time, and dealing with the local council and land registry, etc isn't immediate. Also, buyers in a property chain can cause problems if one of the deals in that chain falls through and they don't recover. It's hard work buying or selling somewhere in the UK. It's not a happy process!
The reason I think there's still a bubble is that housing costs are increasing faster than wages. More and more of peoples' budgets are being spent on just protecting themselves from the rain and scorpions, and at some point this cost just becomes untenable and a correction, or worse a crash will occur as the market can no longer bear such prices.
I'm very skeptical when I hear someone articulate that prices must always go up in the long term because they have in the past. They might continue to rise for a while, but eventually ... pop goes the bubble!
Future stock of tenants (people who can't afford to buy) requires home owners to rent to them. In fact, housing affordability can be problematic here because investors are usually in a stronger position to buy a property to rent it, outbidding someone wanting to live there. You might be aware of negative gearing, too.
Just curious, were your parents an influence in how you view property? I imagine here that many 18-30s whose parents bought property would be more likely to buy for themselves.
Thinking about it, the only friends I can think of immediately who doesn't own their own house here (out of say 20-30 people) are still studying or recently finished. And both would be planning to buy within 2-3 years.
