Halleluiah and good on you Boris for your championing the cause of new homes in London.  We build 5% of the homes we need in the Capital and the supply is being strangled by politically inept planning councils and lenders who are being thoroughly over cautious and risk averse and are conspiring to limit new house building.

The aim of building 42,000 new homes per year for the next ten years is ambitious but if you don’t set a benchmark you will never improve on your performance. Continue reading →

Following the tax changes in the budget of 2012 Stamp Duty for properties over £2million has risen by 40% from the previous level of 5% to now 7% (for non corporate bodies and 300% for corporate bodies to 15%).  This means that if you sell a property and buy another (at this price level) you could find that 10% of the available money to spend has gone on expenses (7% Stamp Duty, 2% agents fees and the balance solicitors fees).  The result is that if you sell a property for £2.5million you only have £2.25million of available monies to spend on the next property. Continue reading →

Dear George,

Bless your heart, you’ve been extremely competent to date so don’t be caught up with the press feeding frenzy about a housing bubble (that actually doesn’t exist in the middle to upper price ranges).  I represent a plethora of entrepreneurial agents who are not doing that well at the moment since there are very few cash buyers, whether local or foreign, in the market place particularly above £2million and as it rises towards the £5million mark and above even fewer. Continue reading →