The Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors Makeover Show

The Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors urges the government to fund the renovation of empty properties to house local authority waiting lists.

So all the time we were borrowing to build new houses, there were thousands lying empty.
This is the benign market working intelligently, again.
Shame a few more of these homes couldn't have been renovated in the last ten years to reduce the amount of dodgy debt, and perhaps mitigate the crash we've just experienced. Even better, councils could have been allowed to spend some of their Right To Buy cash on building new stock, which would have provided rented accomodation for those who cared more about living than about their place on the 'property ladder'. That would have reduced the scramble for credit too, and softeneed the recent bump. But all that would have taken politicians with some guts and ideas.
The RICS can't say they didn't warn us 12 months ago.

"The warning is just one of the "priority" risks it has identified for the next 18 months. The others include customers losing confidence in another financial firm, in the way they did with Northern Rock; concerns about the business models of some banks since the credit markets tightened; and a potential increase in finance crime caused by the downturn."

Shame they didn't make the same recommendations then that they are making now.