economonkey

In our opinion, no. You’ve no doubt read stories about prices rising over the past few months, so you might be forgiven for assuming this means the worst of the housing market downturn is over and we’re getting back to business as usual. We don’t think that’s true.
The most important thing to understand about this [...]

According to the British Bankers Association, the number of mortgages approved by major banks rose in February for the third consecutive month. Happy days are here again! Not quite, despite the rise, mortgages approvals are still close to historic lows and down over 30% on the same period for last year, so we’re not out [...]

The Financial Services Authority says it will place a cap on mortgages to prevent people from borrowing more than the traditional multiple of three times their annual salary, in order to stop the kind of lunacy we saw at the peak of the property boom when people were able to obtain mortgages of up to [...]

Remember that 0.5% emergency interest rate cut last week? The one that was supposed to bring a bit of relief to homeowners and maybe get the mortgage market moving again? Remember that? We only ask because it looks like some of the big mortgage lenders certainly don’t remember it.
The Nationwide announced today that it was [...]

If you’re waiting for this whole “property market slowdown” thing to blow over so you can sell your house/buy a house/stop lying in bed awake at night worrying about whether you’ll have to spend your retirement eating nothing but Asda own-brand catfood, don’t expect things to improve any time soon. The news just keeps getting [...]

To the surprise of nobody with more than a couple of economics brain cells to rub together, the bail-out / conservatorship / nationalisation by any other name of the US GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offered only a temporary reprieve to the markets. Temporary, in this instance, meaning less than 48 hours.
The initial misplaced euphoria from unthinking investors [...]

We’ve all read the stories about rising house repossessions, as the people who over-stretched themselves to claw their way onto the property ladder ‘at any cost’ during the boom years suddenly realise that borrowing all that money to buy a property at a wildly inflated price probably wasn’t such a good idea after all. [...]

The Guardian has a fairly good summary of the findings of Sir James Crosby’s report into the UK housing market. Although this preliminary report does not make specific recommendations, it does talk about the kind of options which are available to the government if it wants to get the housing market moving again. Most of [...]

The big news today is, of course, that mortgage lending has dropped so far through the floor that it’ll soon be burrowing its way to the centre of the earth. No surprises there, houses are still far too expensive for most people and even if you were brave enough to clamber onto the property ladder [...]

According to the National Association of Estate Agents, the UK property market is now ’stabilising’ – which, if you cut through the spin, simply means that a few metrics such as the number of sales agreed and the difference between asking and sale prices have remained roughly level for the past couple of months. The NAEA itself [...]