Word Spy - brickor mortis

n. A real estate market in which very few houses are being sold. Also: brickormortis.

Example Citations:

Mister, this market wouldn't go voom if you put 50,000 volts through it. The property market has passed on. It's demised. Bereft of buyers, it has shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to meet the great auctioneer in the sky. It's so dead that brickor mortis has set in. This is an ex-housing market!
—Kevin Courtney, "Con Text Brickor Mortis," The Irish Times, July 29, 2008

More evidence that the house market in London has been paralysed by "brickor mortis" emerged today.

New figures show that half the properties for sale have been on the market for longer than three months as vendors hold out for the right price but buyers struggle to get a mortgage and wait for prices to fall further.

The proportion of "stale" properties in the capital has jumped by almost 20 per cent since the start of the year. In January 32 per cent had gone unsold for more than 90 days. Last month that figure was 51.2 per cent.
—Mira Bar-Hillel, "Half London homes on market for longer than 3 months," The Evening Standard, September 4, 2008

Earliest Citation:

Estate agents have dubbed the paralysed state of the housing market Brickor Mortis.

Falling property prices and the credit crunch mean available homes outnumber successful buyers by 15 to one, according to property website Rightmove.
—"Brickor Mortis sets in on housing market," Daily Record, July 18, 2008

Notes:

This fun phrase is a play on rigor mortis, the progressive stiffening of the body after death. (Rigor mortis comes our way directly from Latin, and it combines rigor, "stiffness" (from which we get the word rigid) and mortis, "of death.") Brickor mortis was coined by the real estate firm Rightmove, and to date has been seen in the wild only in Britain.

Categories:

Economics
Housing and Architecture

Posted on September 10, 2008