Peter Payack Finance

An interesting article on when the housing / mortgages slump may end.

An interesting article here on pensioners left facing mortgage debt.

Very interesting article over at ThinkMoney re: UK House Prices.

House prices. Who’s talking? Who’s listening?

Announced on 2 September, the Government’s year-long suspension of stamp duty on properties costing £175,000 or less could help some homebuyers – and perhaps the mortgage market as a whole. Previously, stamp duty had been charged every time someone bought a house worth more than £125,000.

However, the real problem in the housing market is mortgages, not stamp duty. Owners’ worries about falling prices – and buyers’ unhappiness about not being able to get on (or move up) the housing ladder – both stem from the difficulty of finding a mortgage (also known as a home loan).

The average house price, according to Nationwide, is currently around £165,000, so a 25% deposit would be over £41,000. Whether or not someone pays stamp duty (a maximum of £1,750) is unlikely to be really significant.

According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the government should ‘focus on the mortgage funding markets as much as on the consumer-facing initiatives announced today’. Director general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders Michael Coogan pointed out that until more funding became available, we would be “some way from restoring long-term stability to the housing and mortgage markets”.

In some cases, though, the stamp duty suspension could make a difference. That ‘saving’ could help someone lay down a deposit that lets them get a mortgage with a lower interest rate. It could even make the difference between being able to get a mortgage and being refused by every mortgage provider they approach.

The stamp duty changes were just part of a ‘major cross-government package of new measures to meet current challenges in the housing market’. Other measures include a £300m shared equity scheme designed to help first-time buyers get a mortgage, and a £200m mortgage rescue scheme to help up to 6,000 vulnerable homeowners avoid repossession.

But with house prices falling, some people doubt whether the government should even try to help people onto the housing ladder. Unless a homebuyer is confident they’ll stay in that property until house prices rise again, buying a house could well be a bad idea at the moment – assuming they can get a mortgage in the first place.

According to Nationwide’s House Price Index, someone who’d bought an ‘average’ house 12 months ago could have lost £20,000 by now. Unless their deposit was large enough, there’s every chance they’ll be ‘trapped’ by negative equity: with a mortgage debt that’s higher than the value of the house, they could find it impossible to move.

On the other hand, renting isn’t free. Someone who get a mortgage and buys a house can reasonably expect to recover any money they ‘lose’ when the housing market recovers – while renters know that each month’s rent money is gone for good.

Written by Melanie Taylor of www.ThinkMoney.com

An interesting article over at www.FinancialDominance.com regarding the financial considerations new home owners should take if they are planning on getting a new home now.

Your future

Renting vs. buying

Interest rates…

Banking group Abbey is set to overtake the Halifax to become the largest provider of new mortgages in the UK.

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Abbey
Halifax

SkyNews - The number of mortgages granted to people buying a house dived by almost 70% in the past year to hit a new all-time low.

Just 36,000 new loans were arranged for people moving home during June.

That is 69% fewer than in the same month last year and 12% lower than May’s figure, according to the Bank of England.

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Mortgages

Those hoping to find an affordable mortgage may be interested in new figures indicating some of the most expensive property is to be found in market towns.

Statistics from mortgage lender Halifax correlated with Land Registry data show the majority of English market towns have higher house prices than neighbouring towns.

More than half of England`s market towns – those which have a population of between 3,000 and 30,000 and have been defined by the Campaign to Protect Rural England – have recorded house price growth above the English average in the past five years.

Full Article

Related Resources:

Think Money
Mortgages