Following our exposé last month on the various ways you can boost your income by maximising your house’s potential, the Government is to issue guidance to local authorities to stop the councils, who are losing out on parking revenues, from taxing the beneficial activity.
Read more in our article here.
PropertySurveying.co.uk – In a bout of good news for the industry, the Department of Energy and Climate Change has released figures indicating a 22% monthly rise in installations under the Energy Companies Obligation (ECO). 33,765 measures were installed in May, taking the total to 115,723 since the scheme started in January.
Much of that success, particularly with hard-to-treat cavities, has been down to Chartered Surveyors – many of whom are members of our network of independent professionals.
If you need a Chartered Surveyors Report for HTT cavities, EPCs or any other form of work under ECO; contact us now – 0800 880 6264.
worthingsurveyor.co.uk – After a ten year agreement with NCP that had handled all of Worthing’s car parks, Worthing Council has now ended the relationship and seeks to gain back control.
It claimed that parking prices had “more than doubled†since NCP took on the contract in 2003, but annual parking revenue for the council only increased from £880,000 to £1m in that time. NCP are suing for alleged breach of contract to the tune of £600,000.
Plymouthsurveyors.co.uk – The government has announced an injection of £32m to kick-start the development of an entirely new town near to Plymouth, Devon.
The project started in 2007 but the downturn halted progress and only now is development once again proceeding apace. It is expected the development will stretch over the next 15 years and generate £1 billion of construction investment and inject a further £2 billion into the local economy.
To contact a surveyor local to Sherford and Plymouth, click here.
What was Thatcher’s True Property Legacy?
On the day of her public funeral, we issued a special, single-article edition of our newsletter, analysing through editorial comment the legacy the late Baroness Thatcher leaves to the UK property market.
Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s death has prompted vigorous debate on the matter of her controversial political legacy. In the wake of the passing of a woman described as “the most admired, most hated, most idolised and most vilified public figure of the second half of the 20th centuryâ€, we analyse the indelible mark she left on the British property market…
Read the rest of this popular article at this link.
According to new research by RICS, over a fifth of home buyers who did not take out a pre-purchase survey are in a property they would never have bought had they been aware of its true condition before purchase.
The recently released results of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyor’s survey of home buying consumers show that homeowners who did not get a survey are lumped with an average of £5750 in repair bills – matters that would have been highlighted before exchange of contracts by a competent Chartered Surveyor.
Llanelli Surveyors – A benefits cheat who had conned the Government out of £4,227.65 has now been fined £330 for the trickery and ordered to pay £85 in costs and £33 in a victim surcharge. The fiddler was caught repairing tiles on his roof , leading to his amusing nickname.
Derby and Nottingham City Councils’ four-year joint highways deal up for tender
The framework will be split into 14 separate lots with a total estimated framework value for both councils of £100m and a potential for the framework to be used by other Midland Highway Alliance members with an estimated value of a further £25m.
In an intriguing story this month, an Aston Martin bought for just £1,500 in the 1970s looks set to sell for around £150,000 when it goes to auction in May, after being discovered in a barn.
The 1964 DB5 Sports Saloon has covered just 48,000 miles and, after 10 years of driving, was parked in a garage in Newport Pagnell, near Milton Keynes, and left for 30 years.
Manchester Surveyors – A £20m scheme from Nedo, the Japanese Government’s R&D agency, is set to hit Manchester, involving the replacement of conventional boilers with air source heat pumps – highly efficient electric heaters that absorb heat from the outside air. These will be twinned with a heat store, which is essentially a hot water tank, to allow heat to be stored until it is needed.
The innovation is in the energy management system that will connect all the homes, linked to the electricity grid and using the stored energy from the heaters to balance the load on the electricity network.
