It’s this one!

Which houseSome estate agent listings make it hard to work out which house is it for sale!
This estate agent has marked it on a map! Brilliant!

It’s on this listing if you want to see it included in the photos!
It’d be brilliant to have this on all property listings, could give you a good idea of whether you’re interested in the house as it’d show how close to alleys etc it was.

Big clocks

huge clock
I’ve spotted a few oversize clocks recently in listings. Are huge clocks now the new twigs?

Why not share the ones you find! I bet if you hadn’t noticed them before I mentioned it, you will now!

House prices – which way will they go?

If you watched Location Location Location this week you could be forgiven for thinking we were in the middle of a property boom again.
However we’re not. We’re at risk of entering a recession with growth teetering on the brink of collaspe.

Perhaps LLL has been told not to be negative about the housing market but I feel it gives a really false impression of how things are.
There are concerns that interest rates will rise. Worryingly people already seem to not be able to manage their debt even with the lowest interest rates for hundreds of years. That tells me one thin g – that there is too much debt!
To have a house buying program on TV not try and barter down the prices, or at least explain about how to find bargains in the current market was a suprise.

Maybe there’s a need for a new property program that shows you how to buy a repossession, where to find distressed sellers, and how to bag a real bargain through a normal estate agent.

You could explain how various online tools work. Things like property bee, property snake, and how to find out house prices of properties not listed in the usual places. Sometimes a little imformation would go a long way. Enabling people to know where to find out how much the house last sold for, what the neighbouring houses sold for recently, would enable someone to see the rather cheeky asking prices as something to ignore and offer lower on!

Watch the news when you’re looking at property prices – see how cheery that is. It’ll indicate how long term job prospects are going which is important if you’ve got a mortgage to pay. You should also take note of the up and coming area indicators like chain cafes opening, delis and posh shops. Are there any opening or are they closing? What’s the opposite of an up and coming area? It’s one in decline and it’s perfectly possible all the niceness that happened over the previous boom years could be undone.
As people cut back on their morning £3 cup of coffee perhaps they’ll eventually start thinking about how unaffordable a massive mortgage is too?

Mortgage first – homeowners warned

Mortgage comes first, owners warned

Thousands of homeowners are to be warned by taxpayer-owned banks to forget renewing their subscription to Sky TV or buying a new BlackBerry and instead focus on paying their mortgage.

More than 30,000 Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock customers will receive phone calls over the next few months from UK Asset Resolution (UKAR) warning them about the possibility of them losing their homes.

Read more here

This might come as a shock to some people who will feel their fancy phone and satelite tv subscription is a life essential.

Whilst this may sound very fair and sensible if you go bankrupt then you can often have these “luxury” items allowed in your permitted expenditure list.

HMO to be rationed in Oxford

Oxford City Council is to become the first authority in the country to enforce a controversial new planning regime which will force landlords to seek planning permission if they intend letting a small property to sharers. It has warned that planning consents will be strictly rationed as it bids to control HMOs.

This is great news if they can stop areas declining because of huge number sof HMO. Whilst some people argue that students bring in money, they also bring in huge problems. Areas where they congregate in large numbers become known for noise nuisance, parking problems and excessive levels of crime including burglary.

It is interesting to note though that the government has changed the LHA allowance for people up to under 35 now so this might lead to more sharing.

Home ownership in England will slump to just 63.8% over the next decade

Home ownership in England will slump to just 63.8% over the next decade says a report by the Housing Federation.

Federation chief executive David Orr points to a predicted drop in home ownership, increasing rents in the private sector and social housing waiting lists as reasons for the crisis.

He suggests building more homes.

However unless they are built as genuinely affordable homes then there is no point.

If they are not affordable (and I mean really affordable by people on even low wages) then you will just be providing more buy to let properties for landlords to buy and the rents issue won’t be solved.

My thoughts:
Rents should in theory be coming down with the reduction in LHA planned. This needs to happen more effectively to allow people to afford to pay their own rents when they work. Having to subsidise rents of those who work just shows how broken the system is and a huge percentage of people on LHA are actually working.

More really affordable housing will mean builders making virtually no profits. A house can cost about 40k to build tops so build in bulk and build big. If the original money wasted on Quantitative easing had been put into building social housing then the country would be in recovery mode by now.

Falling homw ownership by owner occupiers indicates someone else is buying the properties (Else they would just be empty surely) so this needs addressing too. Some areas have strict registration of landlords to improve areas but we need to be firmer on landlords who have poorly maintained propertys.