YOUR PORTFOLIO
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BUILT
ON SAND?
T
HE SAYING “SAFE AS
HOUSES” appears to
be the default headline
for any financial
journalist writing about
property – and despite being more
than 150 years old, it still retains its
original meaning. Its first
documented use was in John
Camden Hotten’s dictionary of slang
in 1874, but it is believed to have
gained popularity in the 1850s when
used to describe the relative stability
of property as an investment
following the bursting of a bubble in
railway stocks.
Property’s safe haven status has
rarely been questioned since then,
whether in literary works (in James
Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, Leopold
Bloom says: “Landlord never dies
they say. They buy the place up
with gold and still they have all the
gold.”) or by the Bank of England’s
chief economist Andy Haldane,
who last year raised eyebrows in the
financial services industry when he
stated that property was a better bet
for retirement than a pension.
The general public appear to
have a similar view – recently
published results from the ONS
Wealth and Assets Survey suggest
that UK residents are looking to
property as the “workhorse” of
their pension savings, with 49 per
cent of respondents citing it as the
method of saving for retirement
they bel