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Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

buildwithtract.com

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Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#71

Post by irishcoffee »

risyachka wrote: post #27
steveBK123 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market. This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population. So there was relative political power in the working age, and a l…

>> Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong Its not just incentives. It can nuke entire economy if done not carefully. Ideally new housing supply would be slowly increasing so that prices stop growing and there are incentives to invest into other assets but at the same time not reduce the wealth people have been building for many years. But overall it seems like the world would be a much b…

No, the problem is considering owning a home part of wealth at all. I don’t even really understand the thought process, and I own a home and sold a rental because being a landlord blows.

You can only ever realize the gain of wealth of owning a home when you sell, which means you probably need a place to live now, so you rent, or buy another house. Maybe if you buy a smaller home than the one you moved out of you can pocket the difference, but because prices keep going up, that doesn’t seem very feasible either, less so if the home you sold wasn’t large to begin with.

I don’t get it. I much prefer owning to renting, and I have never considered owning a home more than a liability. In fact I need to annually make sure my insurance coverage is greater than the value of my home in case I get sued for some reason, just so “they” can’t come after my home.

I feel the same way about wills and people passing away. 95% of the time, by the time your parents die you’re either retired or close to it. I plan to provide for my kids when they’re least able to (college thru about age 30) and figure out after that if I want my last check to bounce or not.

We have such a backwards way of looking at wealth, it boggles my mind.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#72

Post by irishcoffee »

vintermann wrote: post #33
brabel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not what the report says at all !! > Over the same period, total population growth in the UK has been approximately 20%, again close to the cross-country average in our sample. Immigration, therefore, accounts for roughly half of the UK’s population growth over the last three decades. Population growth has nothing to do with price increases? If it does, then half of the increase being due to immigration seems…

> Population growth has nothing to do with price increases? People don't make prices increase, people times money makes prices increase. They're not entirely without money of course, but I don't think it's boat people outbidding you for the homes you want.

No, it’s wealthy people buying and renting properties to less wealthy immigrants. Seems pretty obvious.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#73

Post by axod »

tnolet wrote: post #7
axod wrote: post #4

" Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult. " Nothing to do with millions of new people arriving wanting to live somewhere?

About 6% to 10% increase in housing cost due to immigration in the UK since 1990. Total increase ~150%. So marginal impact.[1] But nice populist dog whistle. 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-and-hou...

You're citing a government report to support their position on why we need infinity immigration? Seriously?

The UK population grew from about 58.9 million in 2000 to 69 million in 2025 - an increase of roughly 10 million people. The large majority of that came from immigration.

And you don't think having to house an extra 10 million people is a reason for the housing crisis?

I would suggest you do your own research, and use your own logic and reason rather than blindly accepting government reports into why what they're doing is brilliant.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#74

Post by MDTHLN »

automatic6131 wrote: post #65
SilverBirch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "move to the us" thing seems to just be absolute twitter brain. The biggest problem London founders face is raising funding and these guys seemingly raised plenty based on an idea that that didn't seem to understand the market they were targeting.

These buffoons started with a bad idea, raised a lot of money to do the impossible, unsurprisingly failed, and learned basically nothing. Or what they did learn was irrelevant to the reason why they failed. It's very depressing, but at least I don't work for them. That would square my depression.

I don’t think that’s very fair.

They seemingly learned a lot. Unfortunately a lot of what they learnt should have been obvious from the start.

It shouldn’t take two years to figure out you need to speak to your customers and bring in revenue.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#75

Post by sjducb »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #60
sjducb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you dump 100 new houses onto a small town you will cause a crash. My town has a population of 15000 people, ~250 houses are sold per year and there is a development with permission to build ~400 new homes.

> If you dump 100 new houses onto a small town you will cause a crash. This has never happened once... There are plenty of developments built bigger than that that do t cause a crash

That’s because big developers drip feed the houses onto the market…

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#76

Post by brabel »

irishcoffee wrote: post #72
vintermann wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Population growth has nothing to do with price increases? People don't make prices increase, people times money makes prices increase. They're not entirely without money of course, but I don't think it's boat people outbidding you for the homes you want.

No, it’s wealthy people buying and renting properties to less wealthy immigrants. Seems pretty obvious.

It’s almost free money! Migrants may not have money (refugees to be clearer, the UK receives a lot of migrants who come as highly skilled workers and those do have money) but they don’t need to pay for the rent, the Government does it for them in case you didn’t know. If you have a few houses to rent it’s really easy money.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#77

Post by bcjdjsndon »

jimnotgym wrote: post #70
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he will come to realise the UK relies massively on house prices continuing upward. Construction is 20% of UK GDP. So many people and businesses in the country rely on it. If house prices fall, or even stagnate, it'll start a chain reaction that leads to recession. Its basically free economic growth, and UK made it's money largely from empire anyway, so now the empire has largely fallen it's no surprise the cou…

Not necessarily true though... building houses for the council requires builders too

The entire UK only built like 1500 or so council houses last year

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#78

Post by bcjdjsndon »

sjducb wrote: post #75
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you dump 100 new houses onto a small town you will cause a crash. This has never happened once... There are plenty of developments built bigger than that that do t cause a crash

That’s because big developers drip feed the houses onto the market…

Why would you begin building if prices are falling? Why would you see that it requires drip feeding because you're so close to losing money, and go ahead with the £100m+ project?

Besides that, they sell plots before they're even built so why are they drip feeding in those cases? You'd be racing to get it built before materials cost rise even more

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#79

Post by bcjdjsndon »

guiriduro wrote: post #68
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people

Maybe that's not as unlikely a prospect (or as bad an idea) as you might think. Do people know if there are relatively small idea-exploration pots of money (VC, angels, subsidies, startup and govt programmes) available in Europe/UK whereby a sufficiently well-qualified initial idea/plan, well-advised small founding team, and initially tested model can go to be funded for PMF exploration without being defocussed into…

I just feel that as the majority of the country scrat about in dead end jobs just to keep the heating on, finding out that this kind of money is just being frivolously pissed up walls.... It makes you question things

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#80

Post by bcjdjsndon »

redwood wrote: post #69
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people

Is this representative of how many Europeans think about technology startups? If so it's very revealing. You have to be willing to take lot's of bets tobhave any chance that some of them will take off and transform your job market, your economy, or how you live. If you only do things that are sure things guess what... stasis. If you have a culture that denigrates failure rather than one that celebrates proactively tr…

It's easy to say that from the worlds largest economy, but Britain can't even afford to run a single public service at pre-2008 levels in 2026
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