was reading something quite interesting the other day and I was led to this by the weekend reading post of the blog Monovator, which we have mentioned before.

And it flagged up a post from a blog called My Deliberate Life and which was talking about the 18-year property cycle theory of a man called Fred Harrison.

Now this rang a bell.

It's like, I kind of remember that.

So I went digging through the archives,

otherwise known as Googling Fred Harrison, this is money.

And yes, of course, it rang a bell because we'd written about this guy before

and we'd actually run a column from him.

In 2008, I think it was, because he had forecast in his 2005 book, Boom, Bust, that another housing slump would occur in 2007-stroke 2008.

And if you remember rightly, a housing slump occurred in 2007-stroke-2008.

This is based on the theory of the 18 year property cycle that the market

moves from boom to bust over 18 years. This is very precise 18. Can they just round it up to 20?

It sounds nicer. No, but it's 18. 18 is important. But you've got to bear in mind that it doesn't,

he's not suggesting it's literally start here and there.

You know, these things, sometimes they go longer, sometimes they go shorter.

So, yeah, maybe he could have rounded up to 20, but then 18 was the number he focuses on.

Now, it suggests the house prices crash every 18 years, and his theory identified slumps in

1953 stroke 4, 1971 stroke 2,

1989 stroke 90, and then forecast the next one in 2007-stroke 8. So he got that bit right,

didn't he? The thing to notice is that actually if you look back on the house price chart,

some of those busts don't even look that big,

because obviously house prices have risen so much that you're looking back and it looks like a small dip.

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