Here’s a question that goes right to the heart of current housing policy: Should we be using incentives as readily as we are to encourage first-time buyers onto the property ladder? However iconoclastic or contrary this question may seem, it needs to be asked. There is so much at stake.
Practically all construction statistics are poor by comparison to the data in most other industries. It is not a fault of the statisticians or researchers. They have an unenviable job as the construction industry is, relatively speaking, very tricky to measure. So the best way to make sense of what is really going on it to look at a wide range of information and see what matches and what clashes and glean information wherever you can. Valuable insight into the…
The number of architects, planners and surveyors signing off the claimant count in the six months to October 2009 to head abroad was 985. This compares with 80 in same period two years earlier. Source: National Statistics (Nomis: www.nomisweb.co.uk). Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI).
So its official – the construction recession isn’t as bad as we thought. And the even better news is that the sharp fall in output at the start of this year wasn’t anywhere near as sharp as last quarter’s figures had suggested. That at least is how the national statisticians might have us see it. The official figures for construction workload show a jump of 2% between the second and third quarters of this year. Workloads were boosted, the figures…
The latest Government house building numbers strongly suggest that a shade more than 100,000 homes will be built in England in 2009. This would represent a 40% drop on the peak year of 2007 and make 2009 a record peacetime low. There are hints of hope in the figures with the starts figures rising. But if we look at the 12-monthly number we see that the accumulated starts over the past year are low, which does not bode well for…
Inflation is now on the way up. That was to be expected. As Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, keeps reminding us, we should expect inflation to be very volatile for some while. But, is it me or do the forecasts for inflation reaching a mini-peak at about 3% in the early part of next year seem to be a little timid? The reason I am a bit unsettled is that if expectations for inflation prove to be…
For those interested in what will happen when the stamp duty holiday comes to an end on December 31, the surveyors’ body RICS has done a little bit of research among its members. Basically, the results seem to suggest that by and large the effect on property transactions will be muted and will not cause a swell in the number of people looking to buy or sell their homes in the run up to 2010. And when the tax threshold…
It’s the run up to Christmas and we’re in a recession – well if not technically, we’re definitely suffering from the recession – so don’t be surprised to see redundancies on the rise and asking prices for homes on the decline. It is the nature of things. And in this regard we have not been let down by the price data research from the property websites Rightmove and FindaProperty. Both show the recent rally in asking prices reversing this month….
A further 38,000 construction workers were made redundant in the three months to September according to the latest Government labour market figures. This raises the total of employees shed over the previous 12 months to 177,000. Meanwhile the figures also show that the chances of those being made redundant finding a new job within construction have dropped even further. Recorded vacancies fell to an average of just 8,000 over the three months to October. Also the redundancy figures apply to…
First-time buyers are increasingly becoming trapped in their first-time homes and unable to move on to homes that better suit their needs. That at least is the implication of some figures that caught my eye recently when I was looking though some data produced by the Council of Mortgage Lenders. Consider this: the median income of a household taking out a mortgage to move is £47,328, or it was in August this year. In 2000 that figure would have been…