Hey everyone, it's Robby here with Rob D and you are listening to the property podcast.

Each year we do something a bit crazy, something that no one else would ever do.

We go back and listen to what we predicted 12 months ago.

What we said would happen this year.

Most people just make predictions and nobody follows up.

But we are crazy

because we do follow up and we tell all of you exactly what we said. Welcome to the Property

Podcast. Thank you for joining us. In case you don't know, we run a business that buys more than

£100 million of the property for our clients every year. You can find out about that at property hub.net slash invest. And yes, this is the annual episode where we fact check ourselves. Were we surprised by house prices, rents, interest rates, or even the Premier League? Well, stick around to find out. A great way to slightly delay today's episode is to bring you this week's news story.

And let's look at someone else who's going to miss their numbers before we look at us potentially

missing ours. So the UK government said that they're going to deliver 1.5 million homes over five

years. And that was by 2029. Now, the reform deputy leader has come out this week

and said they will miss that target by over 40% and deliver around about 800,000 homes.

Rob, I don't think this is news. I'd be surprised if they hit 800. Yeah, and if you don't like reform, that's okay, because it's not just them. Saville's analysis says the same thing, 840,000 new homes by the end of the Parliament. And I think when this target was announced in the first place, we said the safest prediction of all time is to say it's not going to happen. Because it's never happened. No government has ever hit their housing target in the entire time we've been doing this podcast. And why are they going to miss? Well, Richard Tice says in this interview that a lot of it is to do with costs, to with energy costs, to do with regulation, and there's certainly going to be some truth in that. We've talked in the past about how building just isn't economically viable in large parts of the country, but a lot of it is also going to be the market. Builders will only build what they believe they can sell at the price they

want to sell it market. Builders

will only build what they believe they can sell at the price they want to sell it at. So it's kind of a nonsense for a government to have a housing target in the first place, because it's not something they can control. Well, they can't directly control it. They can help get towards it. And I don't think that help has been coming either. I know developers who've spoken to the government push back on how complex things like Gateway have been. That's a planning process that you need to go through if you want to build high rise. It's all a mess. We talk about it before on the podcast. Not going to go into it now. But when they've pushed back on the government and said, but what about your housing targets? They've privately said, well, they're soft targets.

So they're already climbing down internally from their own targets. Publicly, they may still be sticking to them. But already privately, they're saying that it's a soft target, or maybe we'd

describe it as a stretch target. So I don't think Richard Tice or Savils have been physically radical

here with their prediction. I think their prediction makes a lot more sense of what's going to be delivered. We already have to look at where we are at the state of planning, what's being built, the lack of homes being built, particularly in places where they need to be built as well. We've recently talked about the lack of homes being built in London, a place where homes probably need it the most. So there we have it, Rob. We have one target missed by, looks like it's going to be by over 40%. So if we do better than 40% swings on our numbers today, then I think we're ahead of the government at least. Well, I hereby rebrand our predictions, soft predictions. So now we don't have to be embarrassed if we get them wrong because, you know, we just thought maybe, but it would be in the area. So it's as much walking back as we can because we can't delay any longer. We have to go back and see how our January selves did. So every year in January, we make a set of predictions. And then every December, we revisit to see how we did. It's historically been a mixed bag. Let's see how this year went. So we're going

to get into predictions on interest rates, rents, things way outside a wheelhouse like Bitcoin and the

stock market. But we always start Rob with house prices. So let's go back and listen to what we said

would happen to house prices this year. My prediction is growth between 4 to 5%. So where I've ended up

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