House Price Spy Blog

One step forward and one step back…

Leading lender Nationwide have brought back 125% mortgages claiming that they are essential for anyone affected by negative equity in the last year should they wish to move home. Irresponsible lending almost brought the UK and world to its knees in a house of cards which fell leaving the tax payer and regular customer to pay for instutions and irresponsible borrowers alike.

These packages have not been advertised due to the backlash they would have caused for good reason, but borrowers with serious negative equity on their home have been offered these deals.

Were the FSA not meant to ban these loans? Will the tax payer and borrower be forced to pay up again in 10 years time, Alistair Darling has been on the TV all week saying how he has a plan in place to make sure the current troubles never happend again he wants to look at this!

Lending people more money to get out of debt is a short term solution, it simply encourages people to move who cannot afford it. The market is sure to pick up in a year or so and anyone in that situation who waits will start to come back to their former position. We are looking at more people losing their home before the crisis is over, purely so lenders can lend and the market can be stimulated…

House Price Spy is and always has been 100% free to use, giving you access to millions of items of government data (sold by other sites for £1+ each), we manage to keep the website free to use by adding a certain amount of relevant advertising such as banners and our comparison sections such as broadband, utilities and insurance. While we dont plan to change any of this, we ask that members and users of the site should pass the message onto their friends, work buddies, family members and any one else they know about this great free utility called House Price Spy!

Pass the web address onto anyone and everyone you know, let them know what they can do with the site and how it works! The more people that join the better the site will be, the more features we will add, the more extras will will give!

Its still free to join up, free to use and all members benefits are expanding and improving each year so spread the word about House Price Spy today!

The average property price for England and Scotland rose by £6k in the last month whereas the average for Wales rose by just £2k. Demand for property has risen significantly and asking prices are also on the rise, if you are to enter the property market this could be the time to do it! The Bank Of Englands new property specialist Professor David Miles seems to think that we are now at the bottom of the slump and that the rebound curve should be sharp (meaning we will not spend more than a year getting back to where we were!)

Renting property is one of the boom businesses of recent times and is no longer the preserve of students and those on low earnings, with many assessing their lifestyles rather than their earning potential renting has seen a steep rise. Whether rented property will still have a big chunk of the UK property market will remain to be seen after the market returns to pre-2008 figures. At the moment it is seen as a good way to hold onto the value of the property while the market recovers. Will we still want to rent once mortgages are easier to get and the market has more bounce?

Before WW2 over 70% of the UK population rented and now almost 65% of the population has ownership.

Just a quick reminder that House Price Spy gives you unlimited free access to millions of sold house prices since April 2000 PLUS great analysis including easy to use graphs and a unique comparision feature that lets you compare and overlap any result you choose from the millions available. Compare a house to a street to a city or compare like to like over the last year.

You get all this free of charge, just confirm your email address and any areas you want to search. House Price Spy will send you email notifications monthly from your chosen areas meaning you dont even have to log into the website to get the latest sales!

Tell everyone you know about House Price Spy, whether its family, friends, co-workers or anyone. Shout it loud this is the premier free property website!!! No other site gives you more data or more analysis for free! Other lesser websites charge up to £1 a pop for each result or limit the amount of data you can view, with House Price Spy everything is 100% free of charge!!

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House prices fluctuate, but there are more important indicators of how the economy is doing. If property prices go down, people dont spend, factories dont have the work and lay off staff. Unemployment rises, people sell their homes (or indeed have them repossesed) so prices fall again. The spiral continues, ever downward…

Unemployment is at a 12 year High, standing at 2.2 million and rising, anyone in this category will have bigger problems than whether their house price has dropped by 10%. The actual predictions are that the figures on people unemployed in the UK will rise to 10%, however the figures for countries like Spain is set to rise to twice that number.

The US has a brand spanking new President who is almost universally popular with the people, it is impossible to enter a store in the US without seeing ‘ I back Obama’ posters or stickers. We have a lame PM waiting for the end. The only question will he be outed by his party or the people. Any decisions made are sure to be overturned by the next government in 2010. Most of the predictions centre around some sort of recovery in 2010, so you have to feel that whoever is in charge at the point will benefit.

When you think of all the money you have spent during your lifetime it can be mindboggling! The amount of money it takes just to survive, but what are the top ten expenses that we need to stump up for?

Property - Mortgage or rent.

Kids - Food, repairs, education etc

Car - Purchase, running costs, petrol, repairs etc

Holidays - Flights, food/drinks etc

Insurance and pensions – Home, life etc

Electrics and electronics – Gadgets, kitchen appliances, domestic, av, IT etc

Clothing and footwear – Think for all the thousands you have spent on this during your lifetime!

Food and drink – The average person in the UK spends more on alcohol that they do on food! The average person in the UK spends more on junk food than any other place outside the US!

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The mortgages figures for April have been announced by the Council of Mortgage Lenders. The number of mortgages has risen to over 35,000 which is the highest since October 2008. This is a rise of around 16% in the Figures for March 2009.

I think we can agree that the rate with which the economy in general is contracting is decreasing…which means we are near the beginning of the end in terms of doom and gloom. All of the factors which affect us have to be balanced up rather than just the temporary value of our house, like employment levels, taxes, inflation, new businesses opening and a million other things.

The shortage in properties for sale means that prices rise, but when prices rise more people will enter the market meaning prices will then drop as there are more properties on the market and supply outstrips demand. Add in the fact that the summer is the season when most of us move home and you have to take the figures with a pinch of salt!

For the last few weeks I have been seeing a mixed bag of news, are we seeing the lowest ebb of the property slump or is there a further fall to come? Will the recession really hit in 2010? Without a Mystic Meg type crystal ball its all guess work at this stage (although the smart money is on a gradual easing of the situation during the next 12 months) but what can we take from the crisis? What lessons are there to be learned?

Buyer beware! This property can damage your health! Never, ever pay more than a property than its worth. Never buy in an area you are not sure of. Dont buy a property to rent you would not live in yourself. Dont make unusual alternations to properties. Dont borrow more than you can pay back if the worst should come to pass, dont borrow as much as you can get. Do play devils advocate but dont plan for disaster!

Dont borrow money from financial instiitutions and expect them to have a global or ‘bigger picture’! Plan for change by solid investments rather than short term money makers.

Dont get carried away with the current climate, dont overstretch your finances in the name of ‘who dares wins’ and expect to be bailed out! Dont withdraw your savings from a previously solid building society at the first sign of trouble! Dont buy newspapers that preach doom and gloom to sell copies!

OK, so the last few are subjective but you get the picture. We have overextended ourselves, believed everything we were told blindly and basically and let the media drag us into the fiasco. The fact that it does not now seem as dire as once thought just says to me that the media created it in the first place, like dominoes the finance industry then house prices, then jobs all fell!

The average property prices for last month (May 2009) have seen a rise of around 2.6% which is the largest for the best part of a year. However before we get the champage on ice this may refelct the fact that summer is the busy season for moving and there is usually a rise at this time of year due to the convenience of the weather etc.

Another story in the papers is that ex MP Hazel Blears sold two of her second homes and pocketed £13,000 in capital gains tax. Now that the whole thing has come out she has pledged to pay the money back, it also turns that Gordon Brown knew all about these deals. Blears claimed her second home (under expenses) as her first home when claiming tax and ‘flipped’ them to profit from the regulations.

God bless the web, it it was not for modern information technology we would never have know. While the whole furore is getting dull to most people the gravy train seems to be over….MPs actually get £100,000s as balloon payments when they resign so not quite over yet!