Legal Q&A: I bought a leasehold house 10 years ago and I am worried I may have difficulties selling it. What should I do? January 24, 2019 Firstly, please do not assume that a leasehold house is bad news. There are many parts of the UK, especially in London, where there are a considerable number of leasehold houses that are perfectly saleable and mortgageable. You need to look through the documents you received from your solicitor to check if whether there are [...]
The new Urus is the world’s fastest SUV and an altogether different type of Lamborghini January 21, 2019 Remember the furore when Porsche launched its go-faster SUV, the Cayenne, in 2003? Po-faced purists were appalled, yet car buyers were enthralled, and BMW, Land Rover et al soon followed suit. Today, the Cayenne’s popularity means Porsche has effectively become an SUV company that also builds sports cars. Rewind to 1986, however, and it was [...]
Opinion: Property raffles are 500 times easier to win than the EuroMillions but they’re not going to go mainstream until they’re transparent January 18, 2019 Property raffles have certainly generated national media column inches over the past few years. There has been a huge buzz around the concept and it’s easy to see why – the thought of owning a multi-million pound home for the small cost of a ticket could turn an ordinary person struggling to get a foot [...]
Focus On Peckham: The ‘hipster capital of south London’ saw impressive house price growth last year January 18, 2019 They say that if you want to spot the next up-and-coming property hotspot, all you have to do is follow the artists. That’s certainly been true of Shoreditch, the hub of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s. Anyone that bought on the outskirts of the City 20 years ago is chuckling all the [...]
New homes: Our pick of the new builds going on sale in London this weekend January 18, 2019 Fitzroy Gate, Hounslow From £1.4m Get a new house and new body at the same time at this health and fitness day to launch a new show home in west London. From 10am to 4pm tomorrow, personal trainers from Fitness Space will be at the marketing suite for a four bedroom show home in Old [...]
DEBATE: Are falling house prices in London a good thing? January 18, 2019 Are falling house prices in London a good thing? Daniel Hegarty, founder and chief executive of digital mortgage broker Habito, says YES. Provided it stops at a pricing correction and doesn’t go further, the drop in house prices is good news. London’s sky-high prices have left the average 34-year-old first-time buyer needing to borrow 13 times [...]
November rise in first-time buyers getting on the housing ladder January 17, 2019 First-Time buyers bolstered the UK mortgage market in November, as competitive deals and schemes such as Help to Buy boosted the number of young homeowners in the run-up to Christmas. There were 36,200 new first-time buyer mortgages completed in November, rising 5.8 per cent from the same month in the previous year, according to UK [...]
Eager for a house price fall? It’s time for a lesson in economics January 15, 2019 Would it be a good thing if house prices in the UK fell? The British public, a host of commentators on Twitter, and even some economists seem to think so. A recent YouGov poll asked Britons whether a 30 per cent fall in property values after Brexit would be a “bad thing”. Just 32 per [...]
House sales fell in 85 per cent of London boroughs in 2018 January 11, 2019 House sales slumped in 85 per cent of London boroughs in 2018 amid a difficult time for the UK’s property market, new data revealed today. London fared worse than the rest of the country in terms of the number of transactions, with a 6.5 per cent overall year-on-year drop compared to a 4.9 per cent fall [...]
Property of the Week: Interior designer Elspeth Lynn sells her home in Bayswater that’s an homage to Gatsby glamour January 11, 2019 For some people, making a house a home is fun, but for others it’s a chore. Especially – as is the case in many of central London’s most desirable postcodes – if it’s not even your main residence. If you don’t have time for a fixer upper, simply buy an interior designer’s flat. As luck [...]