Bexley Borough Property News

Like elsewhere in the UK, Bexleyheath’s continuing housing crisis threatens the country’s reputation as a nation of homeowners. The number of houses being built remains woefully inadequate in meeting the needs of the growing population in the suburb.  At a recent family get-together, my parents and I started talking about the local property market, a topic that often comes up at family parties, right after the weather and politics. They said that once, if you went out to work and planned sensibly, you would be able to buy a house quite early in your career, along with being able to take a holiday every year and saving for a pension. Today, things seem to have changed. Chancellor George Osborne used the Autumn Statement to double the housing budget to £2bn a year from April 2018 in an attempt to increase supply and deliver 100,000 new homes each year until 2020. He also introduced a series of initiatives to help get first time buyers on the housing ladder, including ...

The “ Right to Buy” scheme was a policy introduced by Maggie Thatcher in 1980. It gave secure council tenants the legal right to buy the council home they were living in with a huge discount. The heyday of council “Right to Buys” was in the 1980s and 90s, when 1,719,368 homes were sold in this way across the country between October 1980 and April 1998. In 1997, Tony Blair reduced the discount and the number of properties purchased under the Right to Buy declined. So what does this mean for Bexley Borough homeowners and landlords? Quite a lot, in fact! Looking at the overall figures, 13,293 council properties were bought by council tenants in the Bexley London Borough Council area between 1980 and 1998. These are large numbers by any measure and are even more important to the whole Bexley Borough property market (i.e. every Bexley Borough homeowner, landlord and even aspiring first time buyers) when you consider that these 13,293 properties comprise a colossal 16.11 % of all ...