Treasury told: 'Reform Capital Gains Tax to help lettings sector'

The National Landlords’ Association appears to be first off the starting blocks with its submission to government ahead of the next Budget, scheduled for November 22.

A statement from the association says its focus has been to ensure that fiscal and economic policy better supports investment in private rented property and that sufficient funding is allocated to facilitate the implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act. 

The 11 recommendations submitted to the Treasury are:

1. Embark on an immediate review of the removal of finance cost relief for private landlords;

2. Introduce a package of Capital Gains Tax reduction measures to encourage the sale of poorly performing investment properties; of properties where the proceeds of the sale will be entirely reinvested into the lettings business; of properties invested in, and utilised, for a period of more than 10 years; and of properties that are eligible and suitable for sale to existing tenants;

3. Introduce measures to facilitate the tax-efficient movement of a letting portfolio into a corporate structure;

4. Establish a government-backed investment vehicle to allow the sale of properties into a managed fund;

5. Reintroduce the Landlords’ Energy Saving Allowance and establish a level sufficient to improve the tax efficiency of carrying out relevant works; 

6. Set LESA at a level sufficient to improve the tax efficiency of carrying out works;

7. Fund the expansion of Help To Rent nationwide;

8. Establish a national deposit guarantee scheme for the private rented sector;

9. Remove the Capital Gains Tax surcharge for property sales;

10. Introduce Capital Gains Tax tapering and business asset rollover relief for private residential property which is let;

11. Abolish the Stamp Duty Land Tax levy on additional property.

https://www.lettingagenttoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2017/9/treasury-told-reform-capital-gains-tax-to-help-letting-sector

Seven London postcodes where prices haven't peaked yet, from Dartford to Camberwell

New data highlights London’s boom towns — still registering annual price growth of almost 30 per cent — and the best areas for first-time buyers.

 Even in London’s faltering property market there are still some places dramatically outperforming the rest — registering price growth of almost 30 per cent in a single year.

As well as identifying London’s boom towns, new data from JLL published today highlights the best areas for first-time buyers — where you can still buy a London flat for less than £200,000.

There are seven London postcodes with current growth of at least 20 per cent, led by Dartford, an area better known for its bridge and tunnel and its traffic jams than as a property success story.

Yet prices in Dartford have grown by 29.5 per cent in the past year, to an average price of £213,483 for a one-bedroom flat.

Hot on Dartford’s heels are Uxbridge, Harrow and Carshalton, which have all enjoyed price growth of between 22 and 24 per cent on one-bedroom flats in the past year.

Other locations with strong growth identified today include Camberwell, West Wickham(just east of Croydon) and Southall. Here starter flats have risen by about 21 per cent year on year.

“Typically the buyer will be a first-time buyer, and the bank of mum and dad is our favourite lender,” said Brett MacDougall, a partner at Hunters estate agent in Camberwell.

Top tip: Camberwell has been historically undervalued

He estimates that an ex-council flat in the area would cost between £270,000 and £300,000, while buyers pay from £320,000 and £400,000 for a period one-bedroom flat.

An increase in the number of new-build flats is part of the reason prices in most of the top areas have increased, as developers’ premiums break price ceilings.

MacDougall said these homes are popular with first-time buyers partly because of the Government’s Help to Buy London scheme, which reduces deposit requirements to five per cent. “Because interest rates are so low, they are borrowing to the max, which they prefer to buying something they need to spend money on.”

His top tip is Camberwell, which he says has been historically undervalued for a Zone 2 location and has benefited from the regeneration of adjacent Elephant & Castle.

Meanwhile the JLL and Rightmove report also reveals the least expensive starter-flat locations, but they are a long commute away.

The most pocket-friendly postcodes in London are South Ockendon, Dagenham, and Erith, where average asking prices for a one-bedroom flat start at just under £146,000.

Other budget locations highlighted by the research include Romford (£170,000) and under-regeneration Thamesmead (£174,000).

http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/seven-london-postcodes-where-prices-havent-peaked-yet-a113866.html

Surveyors down-valuing are causing more transactions to collapse, says Bank of England

Increasing numbers of transactions collapsed in the third quarter as surveyors down-valued properties, the Bank of England says.

The central bank’s latest summary of business conditions, based on feedback on the economy among 12 regional estate agents, said the housing market has softened, especially in higher price brackets.

The feedback from regional agents said: “There were more reports of transactions falling through due to surveyors down-valuing properties, reflecting concerns about falling prices.”

The report also warned that while mortgages have become cheaper, home loans are only going to those with the cleanest credit record.

It said: “Help to Buy was regarded as crucial to sustaining demand among first-time buyers. In the residential mortgage market, both lender and broker contacts reported that competition remained intense, driven by new market entrants and low funding costs.

“However, this competition was mainly concentrated on customers with the cleanest credit history. More customers were taking out fixed-rate deals; mortgages with longer terms, in many cases over 30 years, were becoming more popular.”

Meanwhile, a report by the Resolution Foundation think tank has highlighted the struggle millennials – those born in the early 1980s – face when getting on the property ladder compared with previous generations.

The research says millennials are four times more likely to rent and half as likely to own their own property than baby boomers – those born between 1946 and the mid-1960s – at their age. Millennials also spend on average 23% of their income on housing compared with 17% among the post-war generation.

The report warns that the younger generation also face higher housing costs, smaller properties and longer commutes.

Lindsay Judge, senior policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Across the generations, many are worried about why today’s young adults have it so hard when finding a secure place to live.

“Britain’s housing catastrophe has been 50 years in the making, but while its effects are widespread it is millennials who are truly at the sharp end. For older generations, at least rising housing costs have been accompanied by improvements in the quality and security of housing, as more families have been able to own their home.

“The big danger today is that young people are having to settle for lower quality, longer commutes and less security in order to afford a place to live, despite spending a record share of their income on housing.

“It is vital that all political leaders recognise the scale of Britain’s housing crisis which is placing an ever greater strain on families’ living standards, so that their response is suitably radical.”

http://www.propertyindustryeye.com/surveyors-down-valuing-is-causing-transactions-to-collapse-bank-of-england/

‘We’re coming for you’, council warns rogue landlords after a shock discovery

Brent Council has once again vowed to clamp down on rogue landlords in the local area after 35 men we found to be living in a three-bedroom house in north London.

The men had been cramped into every room other than the bathrooms with bedding. Even the kitchen contained a sleeping area, while another mattress was found laid out under a canopy in the back garden with no protection against the night temperatures.

The discovery was made on Winchester Avenue, Queensbury, at around 6am on Tuesday, when Brent enforcement officers and police entered the property after neighbours complained about overcrowding, anti-social behaviour and fly-tipping.

An investigation is under way to track down the landlord of the unlicensed House in Multiple Occupation (HMO).

Cllr Harbi Farah, Cabinet Member for Housing and Welfare Reform, said: “Rogue landlords make their money by exploiting people who can least afford it - it's a shameful practice and this is an especially shocking example.

“Any landlord treating their tenants unfairly should be in notice – we’re coming for you.”

Last week, Brent Council voted in new civil penalty measures to fine rogue landlords up to £30,000 for housing law breaches, such as renting out unlicensed properties.

https://www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2017/9/were-coming-for-you-council-warns-rogue-landlords-after-a-shock-discovery

Great Estates: the real royal roots of PG Wodehouse's Blandings Castle

Lady Ashcombe at her home Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire CREDIT: CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER FOR THE TELEGRAPH

In August 1592, Sudeley Castle hosted a mad party. Over three days, Queen Elizabeth I and her 300-strong entourage feasted, drank wine and danced to music. The event is said to have bankrupted the Chandos family, the castle’s owners since 1554.

Such parties are no longer de ­rigueur in the mild village of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, where, down a lane off the A40, the castle sits. Now owned by Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, the estate has changed hands many times through the years. First built in 1441 in the reign of King Stephen, it was held by the Crown until 1547, when Edward VI gave it to his uncle Thomas Seymour, the brother of Jane, who became Henry VIII’s third wife.

Seymour then married the dowager queen Katherine Parr, who was Henry’s sixth wife; when she died in 1548, she was buried in the chapel, making Sudeley the only private house to have a queen buried in its grounds. When Thomas Seymour was executed for treason the following year Sudeley passed to the Marquess of Northampton, Katherine Parr’s brother, William, but he was stripped of his properties after the failure of John Dudley’s plot to make Jane Grey Queen. In 1554, Mary I gave Sudeley to John Brydges, Lord Chandos.

 By 1837, Sudeley had another new owner, the Dent brothers. “They saw Sudeley when they were coming over the hills,” Lady Ashcombe says; Cleeve Hill is one of the few places in England where you can look down on a castle.

“They fell in love with it and decided that they would acquire it.” In 1856, the estate passed to their nephew John Dent and his wife Emma Brocklehurst, the Victorian matriarch who would live at Sudeley for 50 years.

Lady Ashcombe was born Mary Elizabeth Chipps, in Virginia, and was a student at Parsons school of art in New York when she met stockbroker Mark Dent-Brocklehurst. Her first experience of Sudeley could have been straight out of a Blandings Castle tale, the P G Wodehouse saga said to have been based on Sudeley: “I didn’t know much about it, but I had heard how difficult Mark’s mother was.”

Instructions were given for breakfast: 8.30am, dressed, in the dining room. “I took it that ‘dressed’ meant that you had to look smart. So I am all dressed up, Mark never appears for breakfast, and when he does he is in his dressing gown. I had to sit there with my future mother-in-law, nervous and freezing cold.” Since then, she smiles, “Sudeley has opened its heart to me.”

CREDIT: CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER FOR THE TELEGRAPH

The couple married in 1962, and lived in London with their two children, Henry, now 50, and Mollie, now 46, until Mark’s mother announced that she would be downsizing. Sudeley needed a complete overhaul. “There was no modernisation, very little heating. It was shocking that it was allowed to get in that state,” says Lady Ashcombe. Mark’s plan was to open it to the public, which they did in 1971, moving from London the next year. A few months later, he suffered a fatal heart attack. “It was a terrible thing,” Lady Ashcombe says. “He had so looked forward to coming here.” Somehow, life at Sudeley had to go on, and Lady Ashcombe continued the public opening.

In 1979, she married a friend of Mark’s, Harry, the late Lord Ashcombe. Her new husband, who owned the Denbies estate near Dorking, was ­initially “wary” of Sudeley. “But we couldn’t keep both going, so he sold Denbies, a huge generosity on his part.” The couple lived at Sudeley until 2013, when Lord Ashcombe died aged 89. Since then, Lady Ashcombe has divided her time between London and her apartment at Sudeley with Tulah, her miniature wire-haired dachshund.

Sudeley’s immediate future is secure, Lady Ashcombe says. As Mark died intestate, the estate was split ­between Mollie and Henry, who each have an apartment in the castle and half of the 1,200 tenanted acres. But what will happen next is uncertain: Lady Ashcombe has five grandchildren, and “you can’t split it between five”.

For now, her ambition is to increase the visitor numbers from 82,000 to 100,000, to support the ongoing maintenance required. “The more the merrier,” she says. The estate hosts weddings and other events including outdoor cinema evenings, classic car rallies, ghost tours of the castle for Hallowe’en and the “Spectacle of Light” winter show. But there’s no infrastructure on Gloucestershire’s country roads for anything on a larger scale. “We couldn’t have a big pop concert even if we wanted to,” Lady Ashcombe says.

Inside, the castle is compact, with “about 50” average-sized rooms, containing paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens and Turner. But it’s no stately home. “I wouldn’t like to live at Longleat,” Lady Ashcombe offers as an example. “They’re beautiful places but they’re overbearing.”

She hopes, at some point, to retire, and someone will have to take over. Upstairs, in the stone drawing room, Lady Ashcombe sits to have her photograph taken. “We took all the Victorian panelling off the walls in here. Everybody disapproved but we exposed the original stone. You really feel like it’s Sudeley.” Next door, the billiard room is hung with Lord Ashcombe’s favourite sporting art. “My mother-in-law raised the floors in here,” Lady Ashcombe says. “Everybody has pushed and pulled this castle around to their liking. But I don’t know what the next generation might do. I know Henry is keen on power showers.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/luxury/great-estates-real-royal-roots-pg-wodehouses-blandings-castle/

The accidental landlord:grubby, untidy students are perfect tenants

They smoke indoors, never clean the loo and you might have to use a cattle prod to extract the rent. But they pay eventually.

£560 a week: a two-double bedroom flat in a converted telecoms building near Old Spitalfields Market, E1, with large contemporary-style reception/living room, period windows and 24-hour concierge. Through Dexters (020 7392 9111).

A mum and her 19-year-old daughter turn up to view a spare room in my student flat. At the end of the tour, the mother looks like she is going to burst into tears. “Is everything okay?” I ask. She shrugs and says: “This is probably the best she can hope for in London,” which is not exactly what I wanted to hear, but her daughter laughs. “It’s fine Mum, really, I’ll take it,” she says, grinning.

This is why I let to students. They don’t care where they live as long as it’s cheap and has superfast wi-fi. As long as they have a double bed and a desk, they’re happy. Do they keep the property clean? Nope. Do they pay their rent on time, every month and without prompting? Not a hope. Do they leave rooms as they found them? Never. So are they good tenants? Definitely.

I say this even though I’m grossed out by the state of my student flat. There’s always a greasy frying pan floating in the sink and dirty coffee cups lying around the kitchen. No one cleans the bathroom, ever. And it has never occurred to any of them to use the vacuum cleaner.

They all ignore the “no smoking inside” rule yet never empty the ashtrays. They frequently clog the sink with soap and hair. They’ve broken the oven, the washing machine and the fridge-freezer.

Two students have just moved out and though they said they’d cleaned their rooms, I fished out pants, odd socks, a pile of balled-up sticky pink notes and dozens of hairgrips and sticky old make-up bottles from under the beds, then had to spray one room repeatedly with Febreze to get rid of the stink of cigarettes.

They’d both left Blu Tack all over the walls and one had ripped a bit off the paper where she’d removed her Harry Styles poster and hundreds of photos, mainly of herself. But still, I’ve come to love my student tenants. I don’t care if they want to live in squalor, as I don’t have to share with them. And it doesn’t matter if they leave a mess because the next lot of students won’t even notice.

Many landlords worry that jobless, feckless students won’t pay the rent but as long as you take a deposit and insist on their parents acting as guarantors, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Sure, you might need to make the odd call to remind them to cough up — they often think that if you don’t ask, they don’t have to pay — and you might need to wait a few weeks at the start of term for their student loans to come through, but I’ve never had one who didn’t pay, albeit after a bit of prodding.

I think it’s a great market and it seems to be growing because many universities don’t have enough accommodation, even for their first-year students.

My daughter received an email from the university she’ll be attending next week — eeeek! — warning her that she might have to bunk in with another girl because of a shortage of rooms in their halls. When she told a friend who was at the same uni a few years ago, the friend said my daughter was lucky — she’d just been given a bed roll and told to sleep in the sports hall.

My new young tenant tells me she’s grateful to have found a room, any room, close to her college. Now all we have to do is reassure her mum.

http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/renting/grubby-untidy-students-are-perfect-tenants-a113716.html

Most people in UK are happy with their current home, new poll suggests

More than 80% of home owners in the UK are satisfied with their current home and the location in which they live with over a third extremely satisfied, a new survey shows.

A breakdown of the figures from the survey of more than 5,000 home owners shows that overall 37% are extremely satisfied with their home and the location in which they live, 43% describe themselves as moderately satisfied and only 4% consider themselves in any way dissatisfied.

The poll, from home builder David Wilson, also shows that geographically, levels of satisfaction amongst home owners are higher in rural areas, with 74% of those living in major cities being satisfied. This compares to an average of 80% in suburban and exurban environments and 84% of those living in rural towns and villages.

The survey revealed home owners are most satisfied with the features of their current home, with more than 70% satisfied with aspects such as the layout, number of bedrooms and off-road parking. Over 65% are satisfied with their local transport links, further aiding accessibility to family and friends living close by.

It seems that the older people become, the more satisfied they become with their living arrangements. The poll found that 91% of individuals aged over 65 said they were satisfied in their home compared to 73% of home owners aged 18 to 24 who said that they were satisfied.

Some 84% of people living in rural towns and villages are satisfied compared to 74% of city dwellers, while 80% of those living in suburban environments said they were satisfied. This suggests that greenery and open spaces are important factors in happiness.

That’s not to say it’s pivotal though, as residents of each type of environment are largely happy and rural home owner’s satisfaction only leads by a small margin.

The majority, 70% of those asked, were satisfied with the price they paid for their current home, while over 65% said they were satisfied with its current resale value.

Finally, only 4% of the home owners we asked were dissatisfied with their current home, which suggests that the housing market, when you take age and location into account, is providing quality housing that provides owners with comfortable places to live.

http://www.propertywire.com/news/uk/people-uk-happy-current-home-new-poll-suggests/