Tag Archives: finance
Average rent of newly let home in UK now close to £1,000 per month
The average rent of a newly let home in the UK has increased by 3.6% year on year to £941 per month, according to the latest rental market index. The gap between the places where people can afford to rent and where they can afford to buy has widened in every year since the market downturn in 2008, the data from Countrywide plc also shows. People are also moving further away if they buy a home. The index report says that 51% who took their first steps on the housing ladder in 2015 bought outside the town or city where they had been renting, up from 39% in 2008. With house prices rising faster than rents, an increasing number of households find themselves renting in places where they couldn’t afford to buy and tenants in the South of England tend to move furthest to get on the housing ladder. This is where the gap between where people can afford to rent and buy is largest and has widened the most since 2012. Across London and the South East house prices have increased 42% since 2012, rising from £218,000 to £375,000. Over the same period rents have only increased 19% from £1,000 to reach £1,234 a month. The growing number of tenants moving further to buy is both a product of stretched affordability and first time buyers getting older, the report suggests, adding that tenants are increasingly choosing to compromise on location in in order to own their first home. Those renters who bought a home in the last year, bought in a place where the average house price was £35,000 lower than where they were renting. Across the UK as a whole, two thirds of tenants bought in a cheaper area but there were even more in the most expensive housing markets. In London some three quarters of tenants who bought in the last year, ended up living somewhere cheaper than where they had been renting with an average price gap between the two places of £93,000. Further north, however, a rather different picture starts to emerge. In some of the less expensive areas of the country, tenants tend to be less constrained by affordability when making the move into home ownership. Tenants buying in the North East, North West and Yorkshire, tend to buy in similarly priced areas to where they are renting. The average difference in price between where they were renting and where they bought is just £8,000. In a number of the cheapest northern cities such as Newcastle, the average tenant buying their first home actually moves from a cheaper area to a more expensive one. In addition to affordability, space is a deciding factor of where tenants choose to purchase, according to the report. Irrespective of location, those tenants making the move further afield also tend to buy the largest homes. Nationally, 32% of… Continue reading
Councils must provide plan for new home building in UK, says landmark housing bill
Councils in the UK must produce local plans for new homes in their area by 2017 or the government will ensure, in consultation with local people, that plans are produced for them. Under a new Housing and Planning Bill the government sets out its ambition that one million homes will be delivered by 2020, including starter homes for first time buyers. However, while 82% of councils have published local plans which should set out how many homes they plan to deliver over a set period only 65% have fully adopted them, and there are still almost 20% of councils that do not have an up to date plan at all. The Prime Minister David Cameron has now made it clear that he expects all councils to create and deliver local plans by the deadline. The Bill also spells out a series of further proposals to boost home building and home ownership. This includes a new legal duty on councils to guarantee the delivery of Starter Homes on all reasonably sized new development sites, and to promote the scheme to first time buyers in their area. The government also announced that local authorities will be able to bid for a share of a £10 million Starter Homes fund, part of a £36 million package to accelerate the delivery of starter homes by helping councils prepare brownfield sites that would otherwise not be built for starter homes. Under the new legislation there will be automatic planning permission in principle on brownfield sites to build as many homes as possible while protecting the green belt and other planning reforms to support small builders such as placing a new duty on councils to help allocate land to people who want to build their own home. In other boosts for house building, Cameron also announced that a temporary rule introduced in May 2013 allowing people to convert disused offices into homes without applying for planning permission will be made a permanent change after almost 4,000 conversions were given the go ahead between April 2014 to June this year. A new website has just been launched which allows prospective home owners to go online to www.ownyourhome.gov.uk to see what government schemes are available to open doors for them. ‘The government will do everything it can to help people buy a place of their own and at the heart of this is our ambition to build one million new homes by 2020. Many areas are doing this already but we need a national crusade to get homes built and everyone must play their part,’ said Cameron. He explained that councils have a key role to play in this by drawing up their own local plans for new homes by 2017. ‘If they fail to act, we’ll work with local people to produce a plan for them,’ he added. Officials pointed out that the latest announcement builds on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which was introduced in 2012 as a… Continue reading
More properties come on the sales market in the UK, new research shows
More properties are coming onto the market in the UK with London seeing a 27.1% and Dundee in Scotland with a 171.1% rise in supply, the highest in the country. In London supply in Kensington and Chelsea more than doubled between August and September with a rise of 122.2% while Camden’s supply increased by 95.7%. The data from online estate agents HouseSimple also shows that overall new property listings increased 9.1% in September with rises of 46.7% in Sunderland and 35.5% in Cambridge but supply fell by 21.5% in Durham. The news comes after a very quiet summer during when housing supply in the UK hit critically low levels but now more than 60% of the 100 towns and cities covered by the index saw an increase in new listings. The Scottish market, in particular, has seen a surge in new property listings in September with supply almost tripling in Dundee while Aberdeen saw a 48.8% rise in new listings, and Edinburgh and Perth listings were up 28.3% and 24.7% respectively. The number of new properties listed across London in September hit almost 25,000 and only two of the 32 London boroughs, Croydon and Lambeth saw a fall in supply but the index report says that there is still a severe shortage of new properties being marketed in the capital. ‘The current housing shortage in the UK has been a major contributory factor in rising property prices. We are in the grip of a severe property shortage and if September hadn’t seen a spike in new property listings we really could have been looking at a full blown supply crisis,’ said Alex Gosling, the firm’s chief executive officer. ‘Fortunately the September figures are far more encouraging. Almost 60% of UK towns and cities have seen stock levels rise between August and September. But it’s too early to breath a huge sigh of relief that a property crisis has been averted,’ he pointed out. ‘Stock reservoirs still remain dangerously low. September needs to provide the catalyst for the rest of the year. The housing market still has a long road to travel to rebalance supply and demand, but these latest listings figures show that we are finally moving in the right direction,’ he added. Continue reading
