Surging mortgage rates ‘biting harder’ on fragile housing market Property Rising mortgage rates are starting to “bite harder” on the UK’s fragile housing market by forcing sellers to push down asking prices. The average two-year fixed mortgage rate has risen to 5.55 per cent, up from 5.29 per cent last month and 4.25 per cent since before the war in Iran, according to homes portal [...]
Bellway warns revived Help to Buy scheme could slow housing market Property Bellway has warned the government’s revival of the Help to Buy scheme could further slow the housing market in the near term by encouraging housebuyers to delay decisions. The FTSE 250 housebuilder said Labour’s new equity loan scheme, Your First Home, is a “welcome development” but cautioned it will not immediately solve the UK’s housing [...]
Housebuilders pull out of London over Labour planning ‘nightmare’ Property Top housebuilders have begun to pull out of London citing a “nightmare” of planning objections that have made developments unviable. Listed housebuilders Taylor Wimpey and Berkeley Group both said that the costs of navigating the huge complexities of red tape and planning processes in the capital are making them less willing to continue investing. This [...]
Cut stamp duty to reap £4bn windfall, Berkeley urges Healey October 6, 2026 One of Britain’s biggest housebuilders has urged John Healey to slash stamp duty on newly built homes, in a move which it says would hand the Treasury a £4.2bn windfall. In its Budget submission, London-listed Berkeley Group told the Chancellor that urgent action was needed to prevent the housing market from “sliding over an economic [...]
Barratt Redrow shares soar after UK’s biggest housebuilder trims targets September 16, 2026 Shares in Barratt Redrow soared after the housebuilder, the UK’s largest, trimmed its targets to deal with the “challenging” outlook that has faced the sector since the Iran war broke out. The FTSE 100 housebuilder said it is cutting back on spending and slashing costs to keep up with the surging building costs and slump [...]
London-listed builder exits ‘challenging’ housing sector after property market slowdown September 15, 2026 A top listed construction firm has pulled out of the UK’s “challenging” housing sector after a slump in demand for new homes across the country. FTSE 250 firm Kier told shareholders on Tuesday that it is pulling all capital out of the residential property sector in a bid to “de-risk” its portfolio. The group’s pre-tax [...]
Barratt Redrow hopes to defy housebuilding gloom by splashing cash September 15, 2026 As some of London’s listed housebuilders take emergency measures to cut costs amid rising building costs and stagnant demand for homes, one firm is splashing the cash. Barratt Redrow, which will announce its full-year numbers on Wednesday, defied the miserly approach taken by its rivals earlier this summer when it said it will buy back [...]
500m bricks ‘just sitting there’ as 1.5m homes target looms September 14, 2026 There are half a billion bricks lying unused in Britain, it has been revealed, piling fresh pressure on the government’s “stretch target” of building 1.5m homes by the next election. As many as 500,000,000 bricks – enough to build 50,000 homes – are “just sitting there” in factory yards across the country, the GMB Union [...]
Stamp duty reform is ‘urgent,’ Berkeley tells Burnham September 11, 2026 Berkeley has urged Andy Burnham to commit to “urgent reform” to stamp duty, which it says has become a “binding constraint” on housebuilders and buyers. The FTSE 250 firm said that stamp duty is to blame for the slump in demand for new homes, because it makes first-time-buying unaffordable and dissuades existing homeowners from moving [...]
Housebuilder shares soar on Burnham council housing plans August 25, 2026 Shares in the UK’s biggest housebuilders rose sharply on Tuesday morning after Andy Burnham revealed plans to spend an initial £10bn on affordable housing. In an announcement on Monday evening, the Prime Minister said the initial funding package would be used to build “thousands more quality council, social and affordable homes”. The funding would be [...]