To speculate usefully about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Britain’s housing markets one needs a clear analytical understanding of how our housing markets work and what forces cause them to change. Given the extreme uncertainty about the impact and evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, anything in this blog is in some sense speculation, but we hope informed speculation. A recent academic paper analysing the impacts on house prices and rents of historic epidemics in Amsterdam and Paris found only relatively short lived and localised reductions in house prices and smaller effects on rents than on prices.

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