That, in a nutshell, is the property cycle. It would be more accurate to call it “the land cycle”, because the cost of building a house on a piece of land is much the same in London as it is in Leeds, and won’t cost more in 100 years (other than inflation) than it does today. But house prices are more accessible to us than land prices, so we can “read” property prices to tell us what’s happening in the land market – and therefore what’s ahead for the wider economy. The stages of the cycle The economist Fred Harrison was one of the first people to identify the existence of the property cycle.
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