News Review - March 26th 2009

Sorry that there was no news update last week but we were off on holiday!

Latest News

Lenders are going to have to get used to interference from the FSA from now on. Unfortunately this looks unlikely to be helpful to buy-to-let landlords.

Mortgage approvals showing tentative signs of increasing again. It remains to be seen whether this is just a bounce that reflects the normal New Year house buying excitement or whether it’s part of a longer term trend.

Social housing demand is definitely on the up. DSS(LHA) tenants can be a great strategy and the demand is clearly there over the long term.

Average house prices are now all the way back to 2004 levels. So when you’re looking at your Hometrack/MousePrice/Zoopla etc.. figures, 2004 prices should be a good guide to a fair valuation

Lettings agents are cheating landlords out of £3 trillion a year (according to smartlandlord.co.uk). I think smart landlord.co.uk might be looking for some cheap publicity here with a headline like that - not really convinced that lettings agents could bail out the entire US economy 3 times over! Nevertheless, I’m sure there's one or two of you out there who might have a few choice words for lettings agent and their fees.

Fixed rates are now down for residential buyers with a raft of new products from lenders. At the moment, the best rates are still reserved for the 75% and below LTV products though. In our opinion, the rates are less important in influencing demand than the LTV's so as soon as loan to values start creeping up again, that's when the real demand and buyer competition is going to come back.

And on that note, a good friend at one of the major high street banks has told me to keep an eye on the news next week for some market leading new first time buyer mortgages - high LTV's and low rates.

BMV in the USA is continuing to perform strongly. Offering a 30% annual return on cash (before you even consider any equity gain), it's proving incredibly popular so far - most popular investment property on one of the largest property portals in the UK. We also now have up to 60% LTV finance available which brings the cash investment down to just £14,000.

Useful Links

Tenant Guarantee - Want to be able to offer new tenants the chance to move in without paying a deposit and still protect yourself?

Check this new scheme out – it’s an insurance bond which takes the place of the tenant's deposit. It will cost you around £100 to put in place, but you should easily make this back through having shorter voids – landlords have seen enquiries increase hugely when advertising properties with “no deposit required”.

New UK Rent Index - We already have countless inidices for house prices but until now, nothing for rental figures. Rent Index is compiled from figures from thousands of landlords across the country to give an accurate picture of the direction of rental prices.

As always, I hope you've found the above updates useful.

Until next week!