Leading charity says changes are needed to make housing system fairer in longer term

RESTRICTIONS on property purchases made by investors in certain locations should be considered among a package of measures to tackle problems within the housing system, a charity has urged.

Scenic rural locations where there is high demand for holiday homes or rundown neighbourhoods where there are high concentrations of buy-to-let properties could be among the places considered for legal restrictions on who can buy housing stock, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) suggested. Tighter mortgage conditions risk the creation of a cash buyers’ market, whereby those with existing capital are able to swoop in and buy properties to let, the JRF argued.

Meanwhile, renters have been coping with worsening affordability and face rapidly rising rents and other costs, alongside restricted social security support, it added.

Its report said: “Property ownership in some places – especially very high demand and very low demand markets –is now so dominated by investor interests that local people looking for a home to live in have effectively been frozen out of the local market.”

The document said that in the longer term the Government should give ‘local councils the powers they need to impose legal restrictions on who can buy stock in defined areas of particular pressure’. Rules could be tailored to local circumstances, the report suggested.

Darren Baxter, Principal Policy Adviser at JRF, said: “We are facing a housing downturn that will put vulnerable families and our country’s economic prospects into serious difficulty. The Government must confront this and recognise that past approaches will not work this time.”

Supply

Ben Beadle, Chief Executive of the National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA), said: “Renters are struggling because there are not enough homes to rent.

“Increasing stamp duty on the provision of the very homes we need would only deepen this supply crisis. It would add further pressure to rents and make saving for a deposit even harder for renters who want to become homeowners.

“It is time the Government accepted calls by the NRLA, the cross-party Housing Select Committee and others for tax measures to encourage the supply of homes to rent.”

Oscar Wilde famously said that a cynic ‘knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing’. When selling your home and selecting an agent, making savings on their fees can be one of the key priorities, yet is this wise? Deborah Richards, Managing Partner of award-winning Sales and Lettings agent, Maddisons Residential, shares her thoughts.

I love the finding from a past Rightmove survey that 78% of people believe their house is the best on the road. This is statistically impossible. There is only ever one best house on a road, but the reality is that we all love our home, and when we decide to sell, assume that someone else will feel the same and it will go in a heartbeat. The reality is that selling a property in England is a highly complicated and fraught process: you are selling a highly illiquid asset in which a multitude of things can, and do, go wrong.

We often sell properties privately, and in such cases, sellers can expect a greatly discounted fee, believing that their sale has been achieved with minimum effort. However, the reality is that finding your buyer is just the first step in a very long process, and the art of getting them to exchange is a constant process of negotiation and communication. If your sellers have in turn found their next home, a good agent is also acutely aware that they hold their clients dreams in their hands.

When Purple Bricks launched just over 10 years ago, they were a definite disrupter to the estate agency industry. However, now up for sale and with their share price sitting at just 8p thanks to running up huge losses every year (this year forecast to be between £15 and £25 million), their big vision for creating an agency based on low, up-front costs, has failed. They simply have not sold enough properties to cover their costs, and so indirectly have shone a light on the fact that traditional, high street estate agents are very much worth the fee they charge. Most sellers, when selling their most valuable asset, want a professional on their side, and I believe that a good agent is worth their weight in gold.