THE price tag of one of Huddersfield’s most expensive homes has plummeted.

The cost of magnificent Banney Royd in Edgerton is now half of what was being asked less than four years ago and at £2.5m is an extreme example.

Yet it graphically shows that property prices have been ridiculously high for a long time.

The hidden cost of all that has been partly fuelling the financial disaster that led to the credit crunch.

Now both adults in most homes have to work just to have any hope of making ends meet and to pay hugely-hiked mortgage rates from the boom times.

Prices were little short of farcical just a couple of years ago with the prudent mortgage rulebook from the 1980s and early 1990s thrown unceremoniously out of the window.

We are all paying the price now in far more ways than any of us could have imaged.

That price is lost jobs, repossessed homes and the long-term misery of way over-inflated mortgages.