Bexley Borough Property News

"An Englishman’s Home is his Castle” is a phrase coined in Victorian times, as the UK had a reputation for being a country of home owners. Today, the cliché is not exactly true. In a league table of the top 46 economic nations of the world, where owning your property is permissible, the UK is ranked only no. 37. As I mentioned recently, at the end of the First World War, 77% of people rented their homes. Most rented from a private landlord, as council housing was still very much in its infancy. Homeownership rose very slowly in the 1920s and started to grow with the economy after the Great Depression. However, after the Luftwaffe had flattened huge swathes of housing in the early 40s, the priority was to get people into clean, decent accommodation. Local authorities, councils, took up the baton and built large council estates in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the UK economy got back on its feet in the middle part of the 20 th Century and wages rose, people decided they wante...

As most of the polls suggested a Remain vote, most of us were surprised when David Dimbleby announced that the UK will be leaving the EU. The pound has dropped 6% this morning, after the City whizz kids got their predictions wrong. MPs from the Remain camp are saying things like “challenging times ahead”. … and now the vote has been cast - what next for the 82464 Bexley homeowners, especially the 45598 with a mortgage? In the campaign, the Chancellor suggested property prices would drop by 18% in the event of a Leave vote. Using Treasury estimates, their method of calculating this was tenuous at best. It focused on an abrupt and hasty increase in UK interest rates, raising the cost of mortgages, and creating lower demand for property, causing a drop in prices. I have to agree that this will probably happen. Where I differ, however, is in the detail. While property values in Bexley are likely to cool off in the coming 12 to 18 months, I doubt that it will be by as much as 18...

Some commentators are saying that buy to let is about to die, with the new stamp duty changes and how mortgage tax relief will be calculated. Have you heard the phrase “Bad news sells newspapers”? Some claim that, nationally, 500,000 rental properties will flood the market in the next 12 months as landlords leave the rental market. I’m here to explain why buy to let in Bexley Borough is only going in one direction – and not the one the papers say! According to Sheffield University, a centre of excellence on the topic, buy to let landlords will continue fuelling the growth of the private rented sector in coming decades. They estimate that the rate of homeownership nationally will fall to 50% (today it is 84% in the area) by 2032, while the rate of private sector renting will increase to 35% (interestingly, in the Borough it’s currently less than half of this). This shows that the demand for rental accommodation in Bexley Borough is only going to increase. These are the reas...

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 ...