House Price Spy Blog

The Scottish parliament looks set to aprove legislation which would see another barrier removed from the foot of the housing ladder. The Single Surveys bill will make it manditory for every property seller to have a survey done prior to placing the property on the market.

Surveys depend on the size, age and value of the property and are usually around £200 to £400. This legislation will be great news for first time buyers but bad news for surveyors who are used to having repeat business on popular properties and sellers who will have another deduction from their sale price.

Single Surveys were piloted up north briefly in 2004.

Read Clarkes previous Blog about Home Information Packs

With legislators apparently keen to tip the balance in favour of buyers rather than sellers (see changes in Stamp Duty) there could be further changes ahead!

When buying a property you will need to remember to include certain Important fees when calculating how much money you have to play with:

Important fees that you will have to pay when buying are as follows:

Stamp duty - 1% to 4% of value of property

Estate agent’s fee - 1% to 4% of value of property

Land registry - around £200

Local Authority search - around £100

Lenders fees -Arrangement fees, lender fees and legal fees.

Surveyor’s fees - Depending on the value of the property.

Conveyancer’s fees - A few hundred pounds

It is Important fees are included when you think of your outlay in buying a property. other considerations include removals charges, storage, DIY, setting up a phone line and TV aerial.

The UK is facing a housing crisis with properties returning to 1980s values of inflation and negative equity a real threat. New homes need to be built on a scale not seen since the 1950s to prevent a housing crash in ther UK.

The UK is presently producing around 200,000 new homes each year but this will need to rise by a third if we are to keep housing affordable for first time buyers. The National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU) has produced a report saying that property prices will rise to 13 times average salary should this trend continue. With many people priced out of ownership and occupations who could traditionally buy property not being able to get on the housing ladder, this problem is set to grow.

This could effect the property market if there is a shift in outlook of middle earning, young people who see property as unobtainable and out of reach. Gordon Brown has promised action on new home building under his leadership.

To use the familiar brand of House price Spy there will be several new websites from House Price Spy in the months to come! Using the quality functionality and know-how we have used to produce the main site housepricespy.com we will be extending our range of services into finance and insurance.

We dont want to give too much away at the present time but the next few months should see us add new websites from House Price Spy to our stable of quality sites. House Price Spy has great links to all sorts of financial/DIY/insurance/broadband sites so expect us to find great deals for our users and make owning property just that little bit easier!

More to come on new websites from House Price Spy when we have more details!

Inheritance Tax seems ridiculous to many people me included. Would it be OK to go to a shop pay tax on something and then have to pay tax again once you were fnished with it-which is basically what happens with Inheritance tax! You pay tax on money to pay for your home and then when you die you pay 40% on it again!

With property prices rising more and more people will have to pay Inheritance Tax of 40% on propety valued £300,000 and over.

Gordon Brown has initiated measures to prevent Inheritance Tax avoidance which could be backdated to 1986! These would mean any payment of £5,000 or more would need to be considered as Inheritance. Pensioners who inherited property since 1986 will have to pay Inheritance Tax on it!

Fortunately for Gordon Brown with the scarcity of new properties and inflation in prices no-one will be able to afford one so most people will not notice! As usual the people with the most money will have the best advice and more options to avoid paying 40% tax on already taxed income, with the government penalising middle earners who have taken Government advice and saved carefully for their later years.

Inheritance Tax is set to bail out Gordon Browns government to the tune of £3Billion!

The Bank Of England has decided to make no change for October to the Mortgage Bank Rate. The last change was a 0.25% rise in June, this was the last of a series of rises which has checked inflation in property pricing and some concern about unsustainable prices and lack of adequate housing.

While there was no change for October, Gordon Brown will want to keep inflation in line with a possible election around the corner.

So there was no change for October, if you want to be the first to find out about the next rise on the 8th of November 2007. check out the Bank Of England Site.

With all the doom and gloom about property prices Buy To Let properties are still looking to be a great option in the long run. With rising population and no increase in suitable housing the gap between the first rung of the housing ladder and renting is sure to be exploited by landlords who can use static house prices to charge more for their accomodation.

Many lenders will be more happy to give Buy To Let mortgages as they have been proven to be less risky than first time buyers or certain other mortgages, thus giving landlords an extra advantage.

This confidence has to be checked by the reality that a property price collapse is never to be ruled out such as the 1980s situation where 80% of income was spend on over-mortgaging property and resulting in negative equity and panic especially with multiple property owners.

Now that the Iron chancellor is the Iron PM it could be a good time to consider Buy To Let. The best advice is always to buy where it is easy to sell even if you pay a premium on location, this always gives you an option to cut your loses.

After my blog of a few weeks ago I thought I would follow that up a little bit. Gordon Brown had vowed not to go down the route that the US has which led to instability in financial institutions saying that they were on their own.

With the Northern Rock hysteria caused by the TV and media with news images of pensioners taking out their life savings (the next day they would put it all back in of course) Gordon Brown buckled and said he would cover Northern Rock and any savings that were kept in there would be covered. As if by magic people returned the next day to pay back in their money-cue smug grin from Gordo for saving the day…

Northern Rock have been criticized for selling risky mortgages especially to first time buyers.

The Northern Rock fiasco has made banks think twice about inappropriate lending, many mortgage lenders have pushed their rates up to 11.5% for some higher risk categories. More and more lenders including credit cards have begun turning away potential borrowers, however this message would have been so much stronger if Gordo had not backed down and relented to pressure.

The last financial institution to go under was Barings Bank in 1995, there was no Treasury assitance on that occasion.

You can’t have failed to notice that there was somewhat of an international crisis going on…American lenders have been criticized for irresponsible lending causing chaos in the international markets. The US Treasury has used reserve federal cash to consolidate lenders.

The governor of the Bank Of England Mervyn King has now requested that Gordon Brown not bail out financial institutions in the way the US have done and this has sparked a fear that house prices will drop in the UK as lenders and their shareholders bear the brunt of this crisis.

The raises in mortgage borrowing rates of the last few months have put a little bit of caution into borrowers and this will have a knock on effect on house prices in the years to come. Combine this with the reduction in bank profits and shareholders payments and you have a more difficult position for many borderline borrowers in the UK.

Any crisis abroad will have the usual trickle down effect in the UK with finance and property the expected sectors to be hit hardest.

Gordon Brown still has the option to use reserve funds to back up affected lenders but seems unlikely to spend tax payers money for this purpose.

The Bank of England have kept the mortgage rate at 5.75% untill October 2007.

The rate has now remained unchanged for two months after 5 successive changes which might suggest that mortgage inflation is now more managable.

Keep up to date directly at the Bank of England keep site