Housing Market View From London
May 11, 2014
With properties in Hackney and Walthamstow, I am slightly aghast at the stratospheric shift in prices in both of these ‘hotspots’ over the past few months. This was confirmed in April by the Nationwide house price index for the first quarter of 2014 showing annual prices had increased 23% and 21% in the boroughs of Hackney and Waltham Forest, but other boroughs like Brent and Lambeth topped this with 31% and 30% rises. Meanwhile my one bedroom flat in Nottinghamshire is still […]
Labour leader Ed Milliband announced a change in Labour Party policy today in a London borough where I rent two properties, Redbridge. The proposals turn previous policy musings into concrete manifesto ideas, most notably the idea for a national register of landlords in England. I was sad to hear Ed speak in favour of local authority licensing schemes, now championed by many Labour authorities, his reference to them as registers shows he fails to understand the complexities of this area of policy.
There are an estimated £1.4 million landlords across the UK, around 300,000 in London where I am based. The latest National Landlords Association quarterly survey of landlords tells us that business expectations among landlords are good or very good and most see a positive outlook for the economy and capital growth across their portfolio. 65% of landlords in the survey were confident that they could cope with bank base rate rises to around 2.5%, which I don’t think we will see until 2018. […]
Your properties are delivered by the property fairy, requiring no cash input from you. You have prospective tenants banging down the door in desperation to rent from you. You charge the highest rent you can possibly get away with, making you a huge profit as you have no mortgage to pay. You ignore your tenants’ request for repairs and do anything to milk as much money out of the transaction as possible. You don’t care about housing people, it’s just a business transaction to you. […]
The National Landlord’s Association announced in December 2013 that half of landlords say they will not consider letting to tenants on benefits: 52% according to its latest landlord survey. Three years ago 46% of landlords let to tenants on benefits, this has fallen to 22%. To those of us in the business this was not news, but since Sky News broke the story, there has been considerable press interest. This week Channel 4 News ran a piece on major […]