The Chancellor’s last budget before the election has indicated that the Finance Bill will affect few areas of the property market.
The property headline grabber is that First Time Buyers will be relieved of paying stamp duty at levels up to £250,000.
This appears to only benefit First Time buyers. How does the Chancellor define a First Time Buyer ?
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The Inflation rate had fallen back to 3% from 3.5% in February, the government has announced. This will no doubt help the Chancellor in his last minute pre-budget tweakings.
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David Cameron, Conservative party leader, and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, have pledged to reverse a £20m tax raid on holiday homes proposed by the Treasury if they win the forthcoming election. The plans, which were announced in last year’s Budget by the Treasury, are set to bring in approximately £20m in taxes in the next year and are due to take effect next month. To read more click here.
The price of gas delivered to people’s homes and buildings in the UK are likely to either fall or consolidate at a lower cost to the home occupier, following the news of Npower’s announcement that it is lowering the charges it is levying to its main domestic household customer base by 7%. For the rest of this article, click here.
The supermarket group, Tesco, is set to back a cheap online estate agency service that is soon to be launched. For the rest of this article, click here.
At noon today, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee announced that it had voted to keep the official UK Bank Base Rate at 0.5%, which had been widely predicted by economists.
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Total lending has increased on dwellings according to today’s released figures by the bank of England. To read the full article click here.
1st March 2010
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have carried out a survey on the home buying and selling process in the UK. It looked at competition between estate agents and other bodies, the rules and regulations designed to protect consumers, and the relationships of estate agents with other professionals such as solicitors and mortgage brokers. For the rest of this article click here.
Mortgage lending slumped to a 10 year low as the stamp duty holiday ended
Figures released last week show that mortgage lending slumped to a 10 year low during January following the end of Labour’s stamp duty “holiday”.
According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) www.cml.org.uk total mortgage advances were down 32% to £9.1 billion during January, the lowest level since February 2000.  To see the rest of this article click here
Whilst the annual shift in house prices for the 12 month period across the whole of England and Wales rose to 2.5% over the whole spectrum of residential property, according to the Land Registry, the numbers of transactions in the lower end (sub £175,000) of the market rose approximately 8% above normal.  For the rest of this article, click here
