HOUSING NEWS

Mortgage lending for first-time buyers, home movers and remortgagors increased to its highest February level since 2007. UK Finance’s latest mortgage trends update reveals that total homeowner purchases, which combine both home movers and first-time buyers, reached 50,000 “Homebuyers have shaken off the winter blues,” said Jackie Bennett, director of mortgages at UK Finance. There […]

  Landlords who break the law by exploiting their tenants should have their properties confiscated, a committee of MPs has concluded. Members of the Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) committee said vulnerable tenants needed greater protection. Many face retaliatory evictions, unfair rent increases and harassment. During it’s enquiry the committee heard that up to […]

Annual house price growth remained subdued in March, according to the Nationwide building society. The increase of 2.1% was down slightly from February’s rate of 2.2%. Nationwide said “subdued consumer confidence”and wage growth not keeping up with the rise in the cost of living had offset healthy employment gains and low borrowing costs. But it […]

Tenants with pets are often charged a bigger deposit MPs and landlords are at loggerheads over the acceptable level of deposits demanded of tenants in England. Deposits should be capped at five weeks’ worth of rent, according to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. The government’s latest plan has been to cap the deposit […]

Homeowners are moving half as often as they did before the credit crunch, figures produced for the BBC suggest. Reasons include high house prices, stricter rules on getting mortgages and older people staying on in large properties. People used to move house roughly four times after their first purchase. Now it is more like twice. […]

Shares in Countrywide, the UK’s largest estate agent group, lost 20% after it warned of tough times in the market. Countrywide, whose brands include Bairstow Eves and Gascoigne Pees, made a £208.1m after-tax loss in 2017, versus a £17.5m profit in 2016. said about 150 head office jobs would go. The firm has been hit […]

Mortgage products allowing applicants to put down a deposit of just 5% have become much more common in the past year, figures show. Some 307 such deals are now on the market in the UK, up from 253 a year ago, according to financial information service Moneyfacts. This is the first time since the 2008 […]

The rate of house price growth in the UK slumped to just 1.8% in the year to February, according to the country’s largest lender, the Halifax. That is the lowest rate of increase since March 2013. The Halifax said that the average price of a home has fallen from £226,408 in November, to £224,353 last […]

UK house prices have recorded their first month-on-month fall since August, according to the Nationwide. The building society said average UK property prices in February were 0.3% down on the previous month. This monthly change is generally regarded as a volatile measure of house prices, but the Nationwide said it reflected the wider picture. The […]

A way of buying flats or houses introduced 14 years ago – known as commonhold – has failed to take off, according to the Law Commission. That is despite the fact that it could provide a much better alternative for those who have leasehold agreements. Four million people in England own leasehold properties, but there […]