May be getting cheaper for you folk soon, my company does a bit with these type of 'off plan' funds and well were looking to get rid of em...Expect a letter to gordon brown soon... The following for release, so im not giving anything away :)Mervyn King’s bewilderment at house prices: the Governor of the Bank of England has been perplexed about what has happened to the ratio between house prices and average incomes. The ratio of London house prices to first-time-buyer incomes has gone from 3 in the first quarter of 1997 to 6.8 in the first quarter of 2007. Ten years ago people were paying three times what they earned in a year for their first home. Now it is nearly seven times.

Darn it, I thought that said "monkey". Now I'm disappointed.

Hmm Housing Monkey...That would be a cross post to seduction skills?

I'm confused. Do you really think this will make a difference in any kind of realistic time frame? Then there's the issue that anything BoE does affects the whole market, and as such there's little it (he) can do to help out something so specific. Unless i'm missing a trick of course.

I thought it said "Housing monkey for grads" as well. I was trying to figure out if it was asking where to store a pet chimp on behalf of some people who were going on holiday, or if was a proposal to swap a surfeit of young consulting jobseekers for an exotic breed of primate.Is a Housing monkey like a cross-breed of a Howler monkey and a Capuchin monkey - i.e. a "How-chin"?

You'd think Mervyn King would have noticed that 1997 came shortly after a period when interest rates were about double what they are now, so people were used to not being able to afford mortgages which were nearly 6.8x their salary.Hardly that surprising (even for the Govenor of the Bank of England) that when interest rates half, the level of borrowing doubles.