Category Archives: Interest rates

Negotiating the Mortgage Maze

Our buoyant rental market and government financial encouragement in the form of the Funding for Lending scheme means that it is relatively easy to get a buy-to-let mortgage now. Many lenders have introduced new buy-to-let products in the last few months, and many have dropped their rates on existing products.

Tapping Pensions For Deposits

 
There’s been a lot of hot air this week: Yes, you guessed it, its Party conference season. Politicians have taken the week off to engage in their respective annual conferences and as per usual, there have been some crackers. Yesterday, Nick Clegg announced at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton of his audacious strategy to give the young a rung on the property ladder.
Rising costs
With the soaring price of property deposits and the average age of first-time-buyers rising to 35, Clegg has advocated releasing parent […]

Will the Eurozone Crisis Impact Mortgage Finance in 2012?

Sometimes somebody poses a question that is so complex that it’s nigh on impossible to answer – like how much would fresh instability in the middle east affect oil prices? Or whether the change of leader in North korea lead increase or decrease foreign direct investement in south korea? So as a landlord, you might just be thinking about the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone and wondering whether it’s likely to affect your financing costs for next year.
Let’s face facts – your success as […]

House prices still not up to last year’s levels

Landlords considering purchasing property insurance on new properties as they take advantage of the demand for rented housing will not have been disappointed with the latest house price report released by the UK’s largest lender this morning.
Slight increase masks overall trend
The Halifax which is now part of Lloyds banking group announced that house prices showed an infinitesimal rise of 0.1% in May compared to April but more in depth figures suggest that purchasing new property is still getting cheaper. Analysis of the figures shows that […]

Growth figures cause clash of opinion in the city

“Should I stay or should I go” say the famous lyrics of a song by punk rockers; The Clash. It is a choice very rarely offered up to politicians or football managers, but is currently very much a question both landlords and tenants are asking themselves each day.
Many tenants are wondering whether to leave their tenancy now before their housing allowance is cut or whether to wait and see if their landlord offers them a cut in rent. Landlords are asking the same question about […]

Low interest rates here to stay?

With the latest predictions of low interest rates being with us for years to come, landlords will be wondering what exactly the future holds for the residential letting sector.
Ernst and Young, a leading UK economist group and sole sponsors of the Independent Treasury Economic Model (ITEM) club, are predicting the current Bank Rate of 0.5% will be staying with us until 2014.  The prediction is based on the present government holding firm on its commitment to spending cuts of around £40 billion and the loss […]