Subprime market in US may end UK property party

English homeowners are outraged that the wild practices of the subprime mortgage market in the US could drag down house prices in the UK, writes Angela Pertusini

The party looks like it's going to be over and, if you want to know who has vomited over the landing carpet and stubbed out a ciggie on the brand new sofa, then turn your heads westwards. Over the past few weeks we have been hearing a lot about feckless American subprime mortgagors - the sort of people who would have difficulty getting a library card in most other countries but in the US are handed a few hundred thousand dollars of housing loan - and who, in an act of what we can imagine is wilful neglect, are about to bring the property markets of the entire western world to their knees based on their inability to meet their monthly payments.

In England especially, where for reasons not entirely apparent to me, we like to think we have a few strings to pull on the world economy, there has been real outrage at these debtors' heedlessness and assumed glee at the mess they are about to land the rest of us in.

Nothing becomes an Englishman more than his ability to huff and look injured and we cannot bear the fact that these shack-dwelling hicks might be about to give our homes, our investments and our pension funds a beating we are unlikely to forget.

What we don't like to dwell on too long is the fact that it could so easily have been ourselves - and still may well be - that brings about the downfall of the UK housing market.

Subprime mortgages may not be such a feature of British life - although, of course, they do exist - but ridiculously high and unsustainable levels of credit are, and it's hard to believe that when every man, woman and child in the UK is carrying around a £10,300 (€15,600) unsecured debt and the country's personal debt mountain grows by £1 million (€1.47 million) every four minutes that we weren't making ourselves a little vulnerable to the vagaries of interest rate hikes.

With the stock market flopping about like a drunk in an alley, we're unlikely to see the record bonuses of the past few years and with that the market may have to accept something it has been unwilling to acknowledge for several years: affordability.

AND IT would be a brave investor indeed who put their savings into the UK commercial market at the moment. There have been dire warnings over the past few months about this field becoming over-inflated as yields totter dangerously close to 4 per cent and below, the lowest in 12 years.

And just like in the US, where the unpolished subprimers are letting the side down, it's the less salubrious investments in Britain that are pulling back the rest: the northern cities yet to convincingly regenerate, the downmarket shopping arcades on the edge of towns and the parts of London that even the Olympic effect will not inflame.

Those with money and good advisers are fleeing to Europe where there is a little more bang for the buck and the analysis of the British market has turned distinctly sniffy.

"In my view the UK is now the least attractive market in the world on a purely pricing basis," one Europe-based real estate executive was quoted as saying last week in the Financial Times.

STILL, there is no ignoring the optimism of some developers. The Cooper Group, a London-based property firm, has recently splashed out £72 million (€106 million) for 27-35 Poultry in the City to build a hotel and £63 million (€93 million) for Marco Polo House overlooking Battersea Park, to redevelop but, most excitingly of all, has just signed the papers for Witanhurst, London's largest residence after Buckingham Palace. Encompassing an impressive 60-plus rooms and five acres of gardens in Highgate, the £32 million (€47 million) price tag was to be expected.

While the agents acknowledged that the Edwardian, neo-Georgian building needed restoration after several years when it was used only for TV shoots, Marcus Cooper's declared intention to put it back on the market for a record-shattering £150 million (€221 million) once the work is complete is, nevertheless, breathtaking.

It may have 12 bathrooms, but that's an awful lot of gold taps.