Not surprisingly, the recent downturn (or rather, in the industry’s terminology, correction/ contraction/period of adjustment/realignment/shakeout) in the UK’s property market has triggered a minor explosion of jargon. Old favourites, expressions that first appeared during the lean years of the 1970s, inevitably resurface in a crisis: gazundering in particular has made a comeback in a buyer’s market. It refers to buyers dropping their offer price at the last moment and was coined by analogy with gazumping, or upping your sale price once a buyer has committed, an old swindler’s term from Yiddish. In estate agent slang gazundering is also known as chipping, so a fish-and-chipper is a ruthless buyer who will chip-and-pin, ie reduce an offer just before completion, leaving the seller helplessly exposed. Radical price-cutting is not chipping but chopping. The phrase you hear most often is chasing the market, which these days invariably means feverishly adjusting your asking price downwards as selling prices plummet.
Language once reserved for professionals is now in the public domain: debt-ridden homeowners are forced into distress sales and bottom-feeders (that is, cash-rich and equity-rich speculators rather than buy-to-let amateurs) prey on them, snapping up any low-end bargains.
Specialist jargon includes value engineering, a euphemism for new-builds finished by panicked developers in a rush and on the cheap. If liquidity problems force them to abandon an uncompleted development, they have to waterproof-and-walk-away, ie mothball the project until the market picks up. The ongoing sub-prime fallout could result at any time in what is
being called a default blowout — so many borrowers falling more than 90 days behind that the trusts holding the major banks’ mortgages might implode.
Builders about to breach banking covenants and unable to raise cash have had to renegotiate deals with lenders described, alarmingly, as all-debt solutions. The whole sector is plagued by write-downs on land values and impairment charges, whereby assets lose their credibility and companies their goodwill.
Despite all of this, most estate agents agree that they have now seen the bottom. Mixing their metaphors, some claim to have detected the first green shoots, and one or two are even already announcing bounceback.
Send your favourite buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
blog comments powered by
