Paul Lewis writes:

The summer passes in more like a few days than a season. And before most leaves have even thought about turning brown, Money Box is back.

I hope you enjoyed Alvin Hall’s two programmes called The Money Grab, which were about high pay in the finance industry. And my colleague Penny Haslam’s two summer specials about coping with the recession – one focusing on small businesses and the other on the psychology of the recession. I particularly liked the statistic that, in the last recession, half the population ended up better off. And that was not much different from the boom that followed. You can hear and read both those programmes on our website: www.bbc.co.uk/moneybox.

If you want to know what I did in the summer – apart from a lot of filing  and my accounts – you can read my Radio 4 blog from about noon on Friday at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2009/08/paul_lewis_week.html or just http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/. And those with any sense at all of rhythm, music or putting the two together will have been delighted to see my name absent from the list of contestants on Strictly Come Dancing.

Our short series of summer specials ends this Saturday when I discuss housing and that key question which seems to interest most of our listeners – house prices: up or down?

Safe as houses. In the long term property is not only tangible. It holds its value. That’s why four of the richest families in the UK are those that for generations have owned most of the centre of London. But what is true for the very wealthy over more than a century is not necessarily so for the rest of us. House prices have fallen by around 20% and the Bank of England estimates that around a million of the 11 million households with a mortgage may have borrowed more than their property is now worth.

But a fall of a fifth is child’s play to people in Northern Ireland. The UK’s biggest property price rollercoaster saw the cost of the average home rise by 50% in a year and then plummet by more than a third. We talk to one man who has just bought his dream home – with two loans. And another who has £50,000 of negative equity – he borrowed about £150,000 to buy a two bedroom house now worth around £100,000.

Many people think one driving force behind the property bubble was the growth in buy-to-let, which now accounts for about one in 10 mortgages. In Sheffield, I meet the person named Property Woman of the Year. And she gets out her spreadsheet to show me the secret of making money even in a recession.

Our panel of guests – a mortgage journalist, the boss of the estate agents’ trade body, and a financial planner – chip in with views on house prices, mortgages, first–time buyers, estate agents, foreign lenders, and…well you’ll just have to listen.

Money Box is on air with this last summer special at its usual time of noon on Saturday. This week there is no programme taster on BBC Breakfast on Saturday. And no repeat on Sunday – that has been moved to Wednesday at 1500 BST. But all will be back to normal next weekend.

Best wishes,

Paul Lewis

Presenter

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