The latest figures for tax receipts suggest that the Government is down about £500 million a month in stamp duty revenue. Taking the three months to October the revenue trawled in £2,162 million in stamp duty. This compares with £3,926 million over the same period a year earlier. The bulk of the stamp duty comes from residential property transactions. The shortfall for the year to the end of March 2009 is likely to be well above £4 billion against the…
The latest starts figures appear to support the view that house building will drop by about a half next year as current projects completed and few if any new sites are opened. That would mean a loss of about £10 billion in construction workload.
Looking at the most recently released housing market data for October it is tempting to interpret it as showing signs of a thaw in a market that has almost frozen solid. On the month transactions rose according to the revenue figures, lending was up according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders and sales were up per estate agent from six to seven according to the National Association of Estate Agents.
The talk now is not of inflation but deflation. The latest inflation figures showed a fall for the first time in 15 months and the Prime Minister chided the opposition with the line that if this year was about inflation next year is about deflation. But what would it mean for construction?
The NHBC figures for October show private sector house building plumbing new depths. The number of new registrations for the month dropped to just 3,454, compared with 14,698 last year. Taking the three months to the end of October registrations were down by 73%. While private sector completions were a shade perkier in October, but still over a three month period they are down more than a third on a year ago. One would expect completions to hold up for…
Here are the figures that the buy-to-let critics and cynics have been waiting for. Rents are plunging. Okay, this is only one month’s figures from the surveyors’ body RICS, but the many buy-to-let critics will see these as heralding a transformation of buy-to-let bulls into buy-to-let rats ready to flee the market. Certainly, if there is a surge in sales from the buy-to-let market this would increase downward pressure on house prices.
For those who may have held lingering hopes of a lift in the housing market after the various interventions by the Government and the Bank of England of late will be disappointed by the message coming from the latest Rightmove figures. The November data suggests that increasingly desperate sellers are dropping their asking prices further and further in a bid to win sales as property transactions dwindle. Asking prices dropped 2.9% in November to a level 7.1% below last year….
Whatever the current worries facing those working in construction, they can reflect on the past 10 years with satisfaction when it comes to pay and hours worked. Pay has risen far faster than for most other sectors and the number of paid working hours has fallen.
The rapidly worsening headline figures for UK jobs are worrying enough for us all. It is a sobering thought to contemplate the pain of 100,000 fewer in fulltime employment and a leap of 140,000 in the number of unemployed over the three months to September. The latest figures for the third quarter of this year show construction redundancies at a 10-year high (and that is as far as the current set of figures go back) with 31,000 jobs lost. This…
Something that has been puzzling me for some while is why bigger contractors were so slow to accept their may be a recession coming. Up to about springtime in various conversations with fairly senior folk and in notes I’d read from main contractors I noted an air of confidence and talk of growth within their ranks. I found their mood a little unsettling and strangely at odds with what I was hearing from smaller firms. From where I was sitting…