In the credit crunch of 2008/9 the rate of home moving plunged to its lowest level ever. In 2009 the rate at which a typical house would change hands slumped to only once every 20 years. The biggest reason being that confidence was low and many homeowners didn’t want to sell their home as Bexhill property prices plunged after the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. However, since 2009, the rate of home moving has increased (see the table and graph below), meaning today:The

I was having a lazy Saturday morning, reading through the newspapers at my favourite Blueberries coffee shop in Bexhill. I find the most interesting bits are their commentaries on the British Housing Market. Some talk about property prices, whilst others discuss the younger generation grappling to get a foot-hold on the property ladder with difficulties of saving up for the deposit. Others feature articles about the severe lack of new homes being built (which is especially tr

My thoughts to the landlords and homeowners of Bexhill… The tightrope of being a Bexhill buy-to-let landlord is a balancing act many do well at. Talking to several Bexhill landlords, they are very conscious of their tenants’ capacity and ability to pay the rent and their own need to raise rents on their rental properties (as Government figure shows ‘real pay’ has dropped 1% in the last six months). Evidence does however suggest many landlords feel more assured than they were

Recently I was having a chat with one of my second cousins at a big family get-together. The last time I had seen them their children were in their early teens. Now their children are all grown up, have partners, dogs and children. Wow – how time flies! So, I got talking over a glass of lemonade with my 2nd cousins and a couple of their children, about the times of 15% interest rates and how the more mature members of our family had to endure the 3 day week, 20% inflation and

As the dust starts to settle on the various unread General Election party manifestos, with their ‘bran-bucket’ made up numbers, life goes back to normal as political rhetoric on social media is replaced with pictures of cats and people’s lunch. Joking aside though, all the political parties promised so much on the housing front in their manifestos, should they be elected at the General Election. In hindsight, irrespective of which party, they seldom deliver on those promises.

50 years ago, in 1967, the first human heart transplant was performed by Dr Christian Barnard in South Africa. In the same year Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side to the right-hand side of the road. The average value of a Bexhill property was £3,664, interest rates were at 5.5% and The Beatles released one of my favourite albums – their Sgt Peppers album … but what the hell has that to do with the Bexhill property market today?? Quite a lot actually … so with

In November 2015, George Osborne disclosed plans to restrain the buy-to-let (BTL) market, implying its growing attractiveness was leaving aspiring first time buyers contesting with landlords for the restricted number of properties on the market.  One of things he brought in was that tax relief on BTL mortgages would be capped, starting in April 2017.  Before April 2017, a private landlord could claim tax relief from their interest on their BTL mortgage at the rate they paid i

A Bexhill homeowner emailed me last week, following my article posted in the Bexhill Property Blog about the change in attitude to renting by the youngsters of Bexhill and how they thought it was too expensive for first time buyers to buy in Bexhill.  There can be no doubt that buy to let landlords have played their part in driving up property values in Bexhill (and the UK) and from that made housing a lot less affordable for the 20 and 30 somethings of Bexhill. In the email,

If I were a buy-to-let landlord in Bexhill today, I might feel a little bruised by the assault made on my wallet after being (and continuing to be) ransacked over the last 12 months by HM Treasury’s tax changes on buy-to-let. To add insult to injury, Brexit has caused a tempering of the Bexhill property market with property prices not increasing by the levels we have seen in the last few years. I think we might even see a very slight drop in property prices this year and, if

An Englishman’s Home is His Castle as Maggie Thatcher lauded – everyone should own their own home. In 1971, around 50% of people owned their own home and, as the baby-boomers got better jobs and pay, that proportion of homeowners rose to 69% by 2001. Home ownership was here to stay as many baby boomers assumed it’s very much a cultural thing here in Britain to own your own home. But on the back of TV programmes like Homes Under the Hammer, these same baby boomers started to j

Can we blame the 55 to 70-year-old Bexhill citizens for the current housing crisis in the town? Also known as the ‘Baby Boomer Generation’, these Bexhill people were born after the end of the Second World War as the country saw a massive rise in births as they slowly recovered from the economic hardships experienced during wartime. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, they experienced (whilst in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s) an unparalleled level of economic growth and prosperity t

Leading independent estate agent Redwell Estates is proud to be a member of the prestigious Guild of Professional Estate Agents. The Guild is a nationwide network of over 750 leading estate agents, all dedicated to maintaining the very highest standards of professionalism and customer service. Guild Membership is traditionally only granted to one agent in a given area. This status means that Redwell Estates has been judged to have met or exceeded the Guild’s exacting Membersh

Tenant fees set to banned within 12 to 18 months Concern this may cause rents to rise as those fees are passed to landlords Landlords won’t be worse off – and neither will tenants or agents Our new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, revealed a ban on tenant fees in his first Autumn Statement on Wednesday. What does this actually mean for Bexhill-On-Sea tenants and landlords? The private rental sector in Bexhill-On-Sea forms an important part of the local housing ma

I had an interesting chat the other day with a Bexhill landlord. He said he had been chatting with an architect friend of his who said back in the mid 2000’s, the developments he was asked to draw were a balance of one and two bedroom properties, compared to today where the majority of the buildings he is designing are more towards two and sometimes three bedrooms. There is a really important point as I explained to this landlord, as knowing when and where the demand of tenan

I was having an interesting chat with a Bexhill Buy-To-Let landlord the other day when the subject of size of households came up in conversation. For those of you who read my Brexit article published on the morning after the referendum, one of the reasons on why I thought the Bexhill property market would, in the medium to long term, be OK, was the fact that the size of households in the 21st Century was getting smaller – which would create demand for Bexhill Property and the

With the Referendum on EU membership out of the way, our households can concentrate on something European that doesn’t involve party political broadcasts or politician’s treating us all like children – the Euro 2016 Football Tournament. Bexhill is home to all different backgrounds and nationalities so if you’re not lucky enough to be jetting off to France for the UEFA Euro 2016 football tournament, have no fear! For a bit of fun (although there is a serious side to this – you

Bexhill house prices since the Millennium have risen by 160%, whilst average salaries in Bexhill have only grown by 51% over the same time frame. This has served to push home ownership further out of reach for many Bexhill people as they have to battle against raising considerable deposits and meet sterner lending criteria, as a result of new mortgage regulations introduced in 2014/5.  The private rental market in Bexhill has grown throughout the last twenty years with buy-to

With young people in Bexhill-On-Sea still struggling to buy their own property and get on the property ladder, my research suggests just how important the role of the private rented sector has been at housing people has been in this town. This is especially at a time of increasing affordability problems for first time buyers, growing difficulties faced by social housing providers in their ability to secure funding from Westminster who also then have to compete against the lik

In this post credit crunch world of sub terrain, low interest and annuity rates, the growth of the buy-to-let property market since 2009 has been phenomenal. So much so, there has been an evolution and a new motivation in the purchase of property in the UK from that of just buying the roof over one’s head to that as well of a buy-to-let investment where it is seen as a standalone financial asset to fund current and future investment (i.e. pensions). So recently, a few days be

Easy problems should have easy solutions – shouldn’t they? Problems like Bexhill’s housing crisis, where we have a rudimentary numerical problem of too few homes for too many people- the answer is clearly to build more property in Bexhill – but that, unfortunately for those desperately seeking to purchase or let a property, takes a lot of time and huge amounts of money. So what are the other solutions? I was a part of the recent jobs fair which was held at the De La Warr Pavi