This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Buying a home is always a scary decision. For most people, it is a hugely important financial commitment – and all the more so now with prices wobbling, mortgage rates climbing, and lots of unsold flats overhanging the market.

Things change so fast. Three months ago it looked as though interest rates would come down further and the experts were forecasting a modest rise in prices overall this year. Now, while in the past couple of days the mortgage situation has eased a little, the markets still expect the next move of interest rates to be up, not down, and the lender Halifax has reported that prices have barely risen over the past 12 months and are currently falling.

So, how can we think about this sensibly? Here are 10 things to help guide anyone thinking of moving home – but before we start, let’s state the essential public wealth warning. That is that everyone’s circumstances are different, and that no one can predict any market with total confidence. So what follows is only a best guess at what might happen.

One: for most of the 20th century, prices in the UK were on average between four and six times average earnings. Before 1900, they were higher; indeed around 1850 they were over 10 times earnings, and after 2000 they have also been higher, reaching a peak of more than nine times earnings in 2021. Now they have eased back, with the Office for National Statistics calculating that, in England, they were between seven and eight times earnings in 2025. Given the rise in money wages and the stagnation in prices in recent months, they may be below seven........

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