affordable housing
-
Latest property news
Budget 2017 – big news for first time buyers, landlords and tenants
Chancellor Philip Hammond has made several key housing announcements that will impact both the sales and lettings sectors of industry and which he said was part of a £44 billion package. “House prices are increasingly out of reach for many and it takes too long to save for a deposit and rent absorbs too much of people’s ability to save for a deposit,” he said during his speech. The most important of these is that Stamp Duty is to be abolished for first time buyers and, in more expensive areas of the UK such as London, the first £300,000 of a property’s sale value exempted from Stamp Duty, if priced less than £500,000. This, the chancellor said, would remove any Stamp Duty obligations for 80% of first time buyers. Other measures included enabling councils to charge a 100% council tax premium on empty properties – which may force many landlords to either rent out their properties or sell them. “Penalising empty home owners with a 100% council tax premium is unlikely to really be a deterrent for people who are likely to be high net worth,” says Nick Leeming, Chairman of Jackson-Stops. “If they don’t need the rent, this penalty…
Read More » -
Latest property news
Housing White Paper: key rental policies revealed
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Sajid Javid (pictured, right) presented the government’s housing White Paper to the Commons today with the aim of fixing the UK’s ‘broken housing market’. During the run-up to Javid’s statement to parliament several ministers including housing minister Gavin Barwell had suggested that the government was keen to break its historical fixation on home ownership and focus instead on the rental market. His preamble to parliament sounded promising. During it he warned that even renting a decent home had become a “distant dream” for many, and that this was the “biggest bar to social progress this country faces”. But there is less evidence of this in the White Paper than many within the industry were expecting, and Javid only referred once to the rental sector in his statement, saying he wanted to “improve safeguards in the private rented sector”. You have to scroll down to page 50 in the White Paper before key measures designed to achieve this aim are found, not quite the seismic change of direction many were expecting. Build to rent The first measure is to encourage more institutional investors to get into in Built to Rent, which is not new,…
Read More » -
Latest property news
London’s DM supports build-to-rent
London’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development, James Murray, has identified the build-to-rent sector as a key player in increasing housing supply and is keen to offer more certainty to help it grow. Mr Murray said, “We need to build more homes of all sorts in London, and the build-to-rent model offers an important opportunity to attract investment into new housing in the capital. Build-to-rent can provide high quality, well managed rented homes, including affordable housing, and can potentially deliver new homes faster than conventional developments for sale. I have met representatives of the sector to discuss ways we can work together – we want to support the sector and offer certainty to investors, which is particularly important following the EU referendum result.“
Read More » -
Features
Unfinished business
The Shadow Housing Minister, John Healey, reflects on the historically low homeownership and housebuilding levels under this Government and outlines Labour’s strategy for housing.
Read More » -
Latest property news
Campaigners to march over lack of housing
A large-scale rally held by over 35 organisations is set to take place on Tuesday 17th March to put the housing crisis at the heart of the general election campaign. The groups, which include Crisis, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the National Housing Federation, among others, are campaigning to significantly increase the supply of new build homes, including affordable properties, across the country to help tackle the chronic shortage of housing nationwide. Campaigners want to at least double the volume of new homes delivered annually to alleviate the pressure on the market due to the general supply-demand imbalance, caused largely by a lack of house building, in relation to demand, which has contributed significantly to soaring property prices and higher rents, which in turn has pushed up the rate of homelessness, according to some campaigners. Research conducted by Heriot-Watt University and published last November by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation explains how such trends might play out 25 years from now if no action is taken to boost the supply of new homes. With fewer people buying their own homes and social housing continuing to decline, more families will move to privately rented properties. By 2040, rents are forecast to…
Read More »