Nationwide’s house price index for April 2009 showed prices falling by 0.4%, but its figures showed a £915 rise in the cost of the average home. This is Money, 30 April 2009 How did house prices fall when the average home went up in value? Simon Lambert, assistant editor at This is Money, replies: The [...]
Britain’s financial regulator said the tests it uses to gauge banks’ capital strength assume house prices will halve and GDP shrink 6 percent in the current recession, making it the country’s worst for more than 60 years. Myles Neligan, Interactive Investor Publishing details of its “stress tests” for the first time, the Financial Services Authority [...]
Government has long recognised that the private rented sector (PRS) has a vital role to play in offering a flexible tenure providing homes for those for whom neither home ownership nor social renting are currently appropriate. CML – Press Release – New update 15/05/2009 More recently housing commentators have begun to note some shift in [...]
Broken boilers, damaged showers and missing keys: these are the familiar snags faced by buy-to-let landlords. But the phone call I received from the agent who manages my eight student flats in a Victorian conversion above a gastro-pub in Nottingham was totally unexpected. Christopher Browne, Mail on Sunday – 18 May 2009 ‘Hi, Chris. Something [...]
One of the basic rules about tax and law is professionals don’t work from interpretation – they go back to the original statute or case law and build from there. PropertyTaxPlus.co.uk – 19 May 2009 If not, you can never be sure that you are working from the right information base. That’s what’s happening now [...]
Price falls accelerate in most emerging markets * Rental downturn expected to gather pace * Emerging Europe sees weakest occupier activity * Upward yield shift gains speed in Japan and US. The latest global commercial property survey from RICS shows that the pace of decline in capital values accelerated during the first quarter driven by [...]
Paul Shamplina has made a living from evicting people. Photo: Andrew Crowley Chrisopher Middleton, The Daily Telegraph – 13 May 2007 It’s barely eight o’clock in the morning, but on the first-floor landing of a block of flats in Hackney, a wide-awake group of men has gathered. They are an anxious landlord, a High Court [...]
The National Landlords Association (NLA), the leading representative body for private residential landlords, has labelled the latest Government recommendations on the private-rented sector as “well-meaning but flawed.” NLA – 13 May 2009 The Government has today published its long-awaited response to the Rugg Reviewpdf [263KB], an independent review of the private-rented sector brought out in [...]
Hundreds of thousand of buy-to-let investors face a “landlords’ tax” and could be forced to register details about their property, according to Government proposals. Myra Butterworth and Richard Evans, The Telegraph – 13 May 2009 Under the new scheme, outlined on Wednesday, a national register of landlords would be set up, with landlords required to [...]
Andreas Panayiotou, who off-loaded apartments worth millions in 2006 ahead of the property crash, has called the bottom of the market and is buying again. Andrew Oxlade, ThisisMoney.co.uk Blog – 13 May 2009 Panayiotou, a boxer-turned-property-magnate, was on the BBC2′s painfully stretched-out Property Watch programme on Monday night (yes, a full hour on house prices [...]
