The Construction Products Association has called on the Chancellor to pave the way so that quantitative easing can be exploited to fund house building. And there seems to be growing backing within the construction sector and without for using the quantitative easing machine as means to increase the number of homes being built.
Plant hire firms continued on their journey of rebuilding prices throughout last year with the latest figures from the services producer prices series showing another upward tick. Prices in the final quarter of 2011 were up about 3% on a year ago. Against consumer price inflation, currently running at 3.6%, and in the face of upward pressure on costs, this hardly suggests times have got easy for the sector. But with activity recently on the up, see graph, and with firms…
The various data suggesting how house prices shifted over 2011 are mostly in and the vast array of pundits have made their predictions for the market in 2012. So here’s a round up of the prospects for the housing market in the year ahead and a suggestion of what it might all mean for house building. If we look at all the indicators, the picture painted for 2011 was of house prices flatlining. Some indicators were up a little, some down…
Hallelujah! The plight of trapped first-time house movers has finally got into the national headlines. Recent research undertaken by Lloyds Banking Group exposes the problem of increasing numbers of financially-constrained first-time homeowners trapped and unable to make the second step up the ladder.
Construction plant hire prices jumped almost 4% in the third quarter of this year, according to the latest set of official figures for services producer prices. The data suggests that prices are up more than 4.2% on a year ago. Less than inflation, but it that’ll be welcomed as good news for plant hirers. It will however not be received so favourably by the contracting community which is already under severe cost pressures and struggling to hold their prices, it…
The 360,000 first-time buyers who bought in 2007 are likely to be trapped in their first homes, says a press release dated yesterday from the bank HSBC. The research isn’t brilliant. What makes this story so unusual and, for me, interesting is that despite it being such an obvious and serious problem so little has been written about it. So what’s the story?
The balance of the news over the past couple of weeks suggests things are getting better rather than worse. But what does it all say about the medium-term prospects of the housing market? To recap. Today Persimmon released a broadly positive interim management statement with the tasty nugget of a 35% increase in first-time buyer visitors over a year ago. Bovis also released its statement today which said private reservations in the 44 weeks to November 4 were up 22%…
This is no ordinary recession. This is a serious depression, the end of which still looks to be at least a couple of years away and possibly a lot further. If that proves the case it would have lasted longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s, although the recession would not have been as quite as deep. The well respected economist and Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf recently wrote: “The UK is in the midst of what is set…
There is a heightened sense of concern over the fragility of the economy after yesterday’s speech by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England and the release of its monetary policy committee minutes today. It all fuels the worry that we really are heading back into the deep doodoo. The downsides are obvious. The upside is that this should help to pull inflation down in the medium term, after a series of “special factors” raised the rate to a level not…
The latest batch of housing market indicators show no real sign that the UK market overall is either collapsing through concerns over the economy and jobs or rising on lack of supply. The pattern continues of house prices gently sliding nationally. But as the latest report released today by the surveyors’ body RICS shows London remains, in the eyes of estate agents at least, a completely different market to the rest of the UK. In London a positive balance of 25%…