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Ed Mead: Sellers need a notional interest rate rise to smack them across the face

by Ed Mead

Today was a corker. Daily Express headlines saying that the property market is set to surge this year, sadly they were narrow mindedly talking about prices only, and on the same day the FT were talking about prices set to fall.Should you fix your mortgage rate now?

I’m guessing that overall we know who to believe even if we want to believe The Daily Express.

But it sums up the issues puzzling any buyer or seller. It seems buyers mostly want to get on with it and most sellers exist in a world of inertia, needing a notional interest rate rise to smack them across the face and get them moving.

What I can tell you is that a couple of weeks in to the new year and it’s beginning to look a touch better here in London. A strange confluence of events, namely mortgage rates bottoming out, dollar pegged buyers from India Russia China and the US here in strength, Eurozone buyers worried about the future of their currency and looking for a safe home for their money, and the fact that Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) is going to 5% for transactions over £1m (not that uncommon in Central London), means that perhaps a market that never really kicks off until the end of Jan might just be perking up a bit earlier.

More soon.

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Ed Mead is a regular contributor to The Big Property List blog.  An Estate Agent for over 30 years, he has been writing and commentating on the market for over half of that as the Sunday Times Property Expert and The Agent Provocateur for the Telegraph.  He sits on the Board of The Property Ombudsman Ltd, has a regular LBC slot, and is happy to say it as it is.

Other places you can find Ed online are:
Douglas & Gordon blog
Ed Mead on Twitter

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Ban Estate Agents boards in central London? Inspired, says Ed Mead

by Ed Mead

If there’s one thing snow does it’s make London look clean.  Covers all sorts of grubbiness, is a great leveller and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it.  You could probably say all that about the inspired decision by someone to finally ban Estate Agents boards across large swathes of central London.

Estate agents For Sale signs in London

photo by Paul Mison

When I started in this business you couldn’t go into certain streets, like Ifield Road next to Chelsea’s football ground, without being blown away by the sheer number of agent’s boards.  As an example, boards in that street were a major blight and no one wanted to live there, hence more tried to sell, hence more boards and so on.  Some bright spark in the late 80s finally banned them in Conservation areas but left other big chunks of Victorian and Edwardian homes open to infection and abuse.  Early this year ironically someone somewhere missed a deadline to renew the Conservation area regulations and for a ghastly moment boards were allowed anywhere.  Luckily only the usual blaggers decided to risk the wrath of residents and erect signage in streets that had hitherto enjoyed decades of delicious virginity.

The venom with which said residents responded, and this is typical of the general behaviour of aforementioned blagging estate agents – they simply don’t give a sh*t, meant that the authorities actually decided not only to put things back as they were pre balls up, but to actually extend the ban throughout most of central London.

The result is likely to mean hordes of Japanese tourists can now take shots of our beautiful central London houses without their rellies back home wondering who the hell ***t*** or ****d are.  It means that local residents have their streets back and are no longer as likely to be conned by the local agent who worries less about which local residents they piss off and more about putting up as many boards up as possible.

The ban IS policed which is good and it would be reassuring to think that this is a precursor of a wider decision to do away with them altogether.

In the meantime get out and enjoy unsullied streets for the first time in a generation and don’t be afraid to report the minority of agents who’ll continue to flout the new regulations.  Feel like the school sneak there a bit, but actually the idea of sellers being persuaded that the placement of a few £6 boards denotes heavy market presence has, for years, allowed the real fringe of our industry to get a foothold, and this might just mean they’re walking on ice for a change.

Author Biography

Ed Mead is a regular contributor to The Big Property List blog.  He has been an estate agent for over 30 years, and has been writing and commentating on the market for over half of that as the Sunday Times Property Expert and The Agent Provocateur for the Telegraph.  He sits on the Board of The Property Ombudsman Ltd, has a regular LBC slot, and is happy to say it as it is.

Other places you can find Ed online are:
Douglas & Gordon blog
Ed Mead on Twitter

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Buy to Let may be the investment of choice, says Ed Mead

by Ed Mead

For the first time since I’ve been at Douglas & Gordon we made more money last month from lettings than we did from sales.

Given that we are a medium sized company that’s not as trite as it sounds. Renting seems to have finally lost it’s stigma and even seems to be where sensible people reckon they should be when property values appear to be on the way down.

Those who work in lettings have often felt, because of the lack of crash bang months, that the drip drip [albeit constant] nature of their income means they’re the poor cousins.

A to let sign outside a houseBut with buy to let borrowing on the agenda again and with all the publicity surrounding Council tenants suddenly they’re front page news.   About time I reckon. Having rented for over 20 years and been dead pleased with it, many commentators were amazed and quick to point out how I was missing out on the market.  I politely replied that I had been investing in something slightly old fashioned and possibly more rewarding. It’s called your own company.

Such is the obsession with property (thank heavens as I’m an estate agent after all) that investing in something that actually yields jobs AND a return seems to have become a lost art.  With 70% of the world’s wealth now tied up with property it’s hardly surprising.

Perhaps with standard investments yielding derisory returns entrepreneurs might start to see the light of day again, but with residential rents looking set to rise sharply, capital values stagnant at best, and borrowing costs as low as they’ve ever been I would think buy to let might just become the investment of choice for a few years to come.

Author Biography

Ed Mead is a regular contributor to The Big Property List blog.  He has been an estate agent for over 30 years, and has been writing and commentating on the market for over half of that as the Sunday Times Property Expert and The Agent Provocateur for the Telegraph.  He sits on the Board of The Property Ombudsman Ltd, has a regular LBC slot, and is happy to say it as it is.

Other places you can find Ed online are:
Douglas & Gordon blog
Ed Mead on Twitter

Douglas and Gordon Estate Agents

 

 

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