I thought it might be worth responding to the comment from Gerry. I don’t get many comments and he raises a good point. My first reaction is to say that I couldn’t agree more that people should see homes as homes and not as investments. I also feel that if we had a better rented sector the obsession with investment in housing would be less. That, however, is a debate for another day. To the important question he raises: how…
Let’s not get too worked up about the £40 billion loss by RBS – those foolish bankers that went into a bidding war to buy ABN Amro at peak. If the Nationwide figures are any reflection of the true value of houses in the UK then we have just witness about £1 trillion wiped off the value of the nation’s housing stock in the same time it has taken for the full lunacy of the ABN Amro deal to be…
The latest report from the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee called Housing and the Credit Crunch is well worth a read for a run through of the current travails of the industry. It seems broadly to “welcome” what the CLG and the Government more widely has been doing to pull the housing market and the industry out of a tailspin. Its recommendations and conclusions are pretty general saying that the Government should stick to its long-term targets…
So Northern Rock is to get back into mortgages. I hear the cheers. The aim will be to get the first time buyer market moving. I hear more cheers. It will start lending on loan to value rates of up to 80% or even 90% – definitely not 100%, because that should be illegal. I hear yet more cheers. Then I think about it from the point of view of the surveyor valuing the property who is looking to put…
Housing starts in England plunged in the final quarter of last year to levels not seen in modern times. At the depth of the last house building recession during the worst three month period at the end of 1992 private firms started 19,227 homes. In the final quarter of 2008 just 12,640 private homes were started – one third fewer. For those with longer memories, the slump in private house building in the early 1980s saw a fall in the…
So consumer price inflation isn’t falling as fast as many commentators had expected. Is that a surprise? Well not really. Ok there are lags in the systems. But with oil price falls, the cut in VAT and deep discounting the big plot twists pre-Christmas, it was hard to see where the further downward pressure was going to come from in January. And anyway the next chapter in the UK inflation saga seems to be all about the sinking pound and…
More green shoots appear to be sprouting in the housing market with the surveyors’ body RICS finding an increase in interest among potential homebuyers over the past three months. Sensibly RICS economists are not getting over excited by this, after all interest from buyers was at basement levels and was almost obliged to rise if it was to move at all. But RICS is punting the view that this probably represents the first signs of an increase in transactions, albeit…
Is it just me, or is there a link between the deals being struck through the Government’s National Clearing House to take unsold private homes into the social sector and the recent collapse in new construction orders for social house building?
The latest new orders figures confirm the dire state of work in the construction pipeline. There was a drop of £6 billion in new work construction won in 2008 compared with 2007, which points to a rough road ahead. While there are some reasons for optimism within the infrastructure sector and public non-housing spending is holding up, the giant housing and commercial sectors have fallen off a cliff.
The latest employment figures provide yet more grim reading for those in construction with the numbers made redundant in the final quarter of last year rocketing to 48,000. The official figures out today show that 109,000 construction employees were made redundant over the year. Some will have got new jobs, but the claimant count figures suggest that many have not. The redundancy figures also underplay the carnage in the construction jobs market as so many of those engaged in the…