Property news and changes
A good feature of the money pumped into the finance sector is that Northern Rock has pledged to offer an extra £14 billion for mortgages for responsible borrowers such as first time buyers and re-mortgages. The institution is ahead of schedule in paying back the billions it borrowed from the public coffers with an extra £16 billion payed back over what was expected. This will be good for the national debt and good for the industry in terms of a health and brave attitude to lending, after many people were expecting the mortgage sector to die off
Over a year ago I blogged about the outcry about new housing being built and with the building industry facing another slump less properties are being built than ever, a new group called the 2020 group are saying that an extra £6.3 billion needs to be spent to cope with the shortfall, although pumping billions of public money into something that will surely lower property prices could be counter productive. Subsidising private building companies to build cheap housing that will mean our own properties are worth less…this will not be popular.
Gordon Brown has been in the news in the last few days saying that he wants to ban the ’100% mortgage’, but of course the horse has bolted on that one! He should have thought about that ages ago before we reached this point. With President Obama now inaugurated we can see what he intends to do about record numbers of home repossessions since the UK usually follows in line. UK repossessions rose by 50% to 40,000 during 2008.
There are still people buying property, still mortgages to be had and great interest in the property market!