The boomers ate all the avocados

Sure let's have a government directing the property market and the lending market. Thanks but they already interfere with the market more than enough by artificially restricting supply.

Your suggestions are already happening or something similar. They don't address the fundamental supply shortage and someone with enough spare cash for a second home is always going to out compete a local first time buyer.

supply shortage is patchy and localised… the abundance of second homes and buy to let properties, including air b&b goes to show that there isn’t a great shortage of properties, but properties are distributed in fewer hands than they should be.

It depends… I think if the problem is affordability, then having more bidders on the market inevitably makes properties more expensive… this in turn means reants are higher. You could also regulate the rental market (it is regulated in many countries) and impose a fixed price per square meter in a given postcode. This would put off the more outrageous buy to let punters and make properties more affordable for all.

Airbnb and holiday homes are occupied by people who have another home elsewhere, unoccupied for that period. Effectively they are an extension to the home elsewhere in the country.

Buy to let are lived in. Not by the owner, but they are an additional home.

yep, i've got more friends leaving uk, they can get a huge place with land, local shops, services, and not too far from an airport with london direct flights, all for a fraction of a generic 30s suburban semi, better weather, far less crime, better roads

i'm off to have a scout around in a few weeks as i'm thinking of doing it, as long as you've got the cash/income stream it's easy to get residency

and yet, there seems to be a problem in coastal areas, where up to 70% of the properties are owned by non residents. It would have been easy to address the problem, but they let it go out of hand.

Unfortunately, in this country there is still a strong belief that markets regulate themselves and ultimately the free market is the best way to achieve wealth and fairness for all… well, this has been disproved over and over in the past decades, but nobody seems to be prepared to acknowledge it and do something about it.

Of course, when wealthy few fund political parties to this extent, it is very difficult to change things, is it?

In Italy there is what is called the “canone” whereby you are expected to rent out a property legally at a fixed rate. There is a black market of course, but there are also ways to report it.

The bottom line is that buy to let is almost inexistent, as economically is not very viable and properties are typically remted out by those who inherit them and don’t need them to live, but equally might not want to sell. The all idea of subsidising a mortgage with a rent is not on the cards… it’s just a bonkers thing, born out of extreme and reckless capitalism

there is that.

However, my objection to buy to let is that I do not see the benefit of it to society. If a rent for a given house is higher than the mortgage repayment, as it always is, it only means that the owner had more access to credit than the tenant, or in other words took advantage of their financial position to exploit others and make even more money. This is speculation, whichever way you want to look at it and what is worse is that it exploites a basic human right, that of having a place to live.

Just in case @rick_chasey didn't dislike the Telegraph already...

I think that type of opinion is the sort of one that would agree that the likelihood of breaking bones and developing dementia because of repeated concussions is what makes rugby such a good sport for schoolchildren... really teaches them to toughen up and stop complaining.

Just because it's hypocritical doesn't mean that it's wrong. Although Gen Z seem to be taking workshy and entitled mantle from the Millennials.

Possibly you need to speak to your recruitment team. No issues here.

Which other people half your age are you hanging around with? And how would you know how hard they work?

I would say there is a difference in attitude but I don’t think they’re workshy.

Younger people do not believe that there are genuine opportunities and upsides for working above and beyond for no extra pay early on in their career, plus the labour market is tight.

They want to be paid for the work they do now. They see the idea of working all hours as a junior to get ahead as a scam and look at middle management and don’t see evidence they’re wrong. If their boss says that’s not right they’ll just go somewhere else because the market is tight enough.

There’s a revealing TikToker which is a guy who’s mid 20s in the UK and he’s just got a new boss who’s come from American. The new boss keeps kicking off because the guy refuses to attend 8am calls the boss lines up.

His argument is that he’s paid for 9-5:30 so he wants to go to classes beforehand.

In response to “be the good corporate citizen” and pay it forward, he just says “the second they can’t afford me I’m gone anyway, they show no loyalty and if it’s so important for me to work that extra hour they can pay me for it”.

I guess boomer mentality calls that workshy. But I think at junior level roles the amount of turnover of roles is so high that loyalty that was a feature of white collar work back in the day is long long gone.

That’s the trade off with relentless “upskilling” which, i admit, I am a part of (and incentivised to encourage) at more senior levels.

I think there's a huge amount in that. When I was entering the workplace the idea of a 'job for life' was still a thing and lots of people worked for one employer. These days there is very little loyalty from a company to an employee but it remains something that employers have also expected the other way. I think younger generations have realised that and take jobs as stepping stones. It used to surprise me how many employers people I was interviewing in their 20s and early 30s had already got through (I think, as an employer, there is still a frequency at which alarm bells ring though). I also found employers who claim they don't have the money to give existing staff pay rises somehow manage to find enough to pay the market rate to take on new staff.