The latest figures from the Bank of England showing the number of mortgage approvals at a nine month low have caused a bit of a stir and increased talk of a double dip in the housing market. Here’s a few reasons why.
The data published today on planning applications on the face of it should provide house builders and their suppliers with some comfort. The figures show that in the final quarter of last year the number of planning decisions for major residential developments – those with 10 or more homes – rose for the second quarter in a row. Admittedly the number, 1,300 in the quarter, is about half that of the average during the boom years between 2003 and 2008, but…
There is obvious glee within the housing market about the prospects of a two-year period free of stamp duty for those first-time buyers who purchase properties worth less than £250,000. The £250,000 threshold captures practically all of them, with significantly less than 10% of exceptions that will be mainly resident in London and the South East. And the cost of this “Budget giveaway” the Treasury puts at under £300 million annually at worst. This figure is of course a hypothetical resting on the…
Few people disagree with the notion that there is a housing shortage in England. It is trotted out both as an argument for more social homes and as an underlying case for ever increasing house prices. I too subscribe to the view that we need to increase and enhance the English, and indeed UK, housing stock. But here is something that caught my eye when I was checking out some figures recently. Consider this: according to the Survey of English…
For the optimists in the construction industry there is much hope to be gleaned from the latest employment figures. Equally for the pessimists there is plenty within the numbers to fret about. So what should we make of the latest batch of labour market numbers that, among other things, show that 163,000 redundacies were recorded in construction in 2009?
There has been a sharp change of mood among the traders of housing futures who punt large sums on the level of house prices at given years ahead. Traders had turned bullish last autumn and even at the end of the year the Tradition Future HPI was showing a projected one-year out rise of 5% in house prices. That bullish sentiment turned distinctly sheepish by the end of last month and now the market has settled on a 1% rise one year…
The latest Experian forecast is out today and it paints a broadly similar, albeit slightly more optimistic, picture to that of the recently released forecast from the Construction Products Association. The main point of departure is on the views towards housing. Here the Experian forecasters are more bullish, if you can say that about a market that even by 2012 is expected to be almost 30% smaller than it was before the credit crunch. Experian’s expectation of a faster improvement…
The latest Government planning data on the face of it supports the view that there has been a bounce in activity within the house building sector. The topline data, released today, for residential planning decision show a fall in the September quarter compared with both the previous quarter and on the same quarter last year.
On the subject of Grant Shapps and John Healey, I attended the Housing Market Intelligence conference last week at which both spoke. I obviously recommend the conference because I have a vested interest in it and indeed the associated report, which I edit. But that is not the point. While the presentation styles of the two politicans could not have been more different, there was one thread I noticed that appeared to tie the two presentations together. Given that this…
During a conversation with a colleague on the recent spate of cash calls by house builders I was quizzed on how much damage the recession had done to their balance sheets. I made a stab (a lucky guess as it turned out), but I should have had a number at my figure tips. I waffled while I grabbed a calculator and tapped in some very rough and ready numbers. Well have a guess how much that bit of number crunching…