The boon in the housing market in the early part of this decade saw a sharp and seemingly unrelenting increase in the prices of property. This caused a love affair with property and house buying from the British public, fuelled by TV shows such as Location, Location, Location and Property Ladder.
Property Ladder, hosted by self made property developer Sarah Beeny, followed budding property developers as they bought their first houses for renovation and set about making improvements in order to make a profit.
All too often Sarah Beeny would find fault with the changes being made by the first time developers, such as imposing their own tastes on a property or wasting the chance to create a bedroom instead of a third bathroom, yet because of the rise in property prices the developers rarely suffered from their ignorance. After making a spate of mistakes in the eyes of Sarah Beeny, the developers would invariably make a profit on their property, not because of the changes they had made to the development, but because of the rise in the housing market.
This led to the false belief that becoming a property developer was easy, and anyone could make a profit no matter how much they spent on their development, how far over budget they went or how personal the tastes were they imprinted on their development.
Of course things are very different now, as fewer developments are being worked on and fewer people are making the jump into property development, either to sell on or to let out. With the mortgage industry in the difficult position that it is right now, any new series of Property Ladder filmed today would find that developers would have to be very careful with their budgets and very neutral with their décor in order to make a profit; if indeed they could get a mortgage for a property development at all.
