tim123
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Posts posted by tim123
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Anyone fancy living on a high street?
There's clearly a huge over supply of shops in some areas, still I'm sure high rents and high business rates aren't the problem its lazy Brits not wanting to work?
I agree.
The pligth of Margate is particularly bad and any money that Portas throws at it will be wasted.
No-one goes to Margate as a shopping centre and even if they can (big hope, but possible) revive the town as a tourist (day trip) destination this will just help the shops on the sea front.
All of the locals go to the new out of town centre so ISTM that they need to bite the bullet and come up with a plan to turn the centre into housing.
tim
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Good point about giving up the brand name, it must have been the company's main asset. But surely they are nothing more than a very poor hosting service and a very poor search engine who are £2 billion in debt. If my maths is correct, they need to earn a £500 profit from every single small and medium enterprise in the UK (all 4.5 million of them) just to break even.
You're out by a factor of 10 (unless my maths is wrong)
Breaking even requires them to pay the interest on the debt not the principle
tim
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NIMBY
wrt to (1) and (2) I disagree. I pointed out my reasoning for not wanting them and it has nothing to do with them being built next to me
As to (3)
Guilty - what's wrong with that - would you like to live next to it
tim
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Where does that figure come from? I expect few newborns have any pension provision, and the numbers gradually rise through life. With some unevenness for short-term generational effects, like whether you graduated into a boom or a bust.
Everyone has a state pension waiting at age 68 or thereabouts (younger for those born before the magic date in April 1960). Any more on top of that is a bonus.
[edit] Oh, and forgot my original point: this kind of survey is never more than a bit of fun, and trustnet's readership is not exactly average.
Sorry
I meant other than the state pension.
tim
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go here and play with the dates until you find what you want
http://www.landregistry.gov.uk/public/house-prices-and-sales/search-the-index
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The owner hasn't lost their property and the damage has been fixed.
Is that worth being threatened with death over?
Yes or no?
Eh, whose threatening death as a penalty?
come back when you've stopped asking stupid quesions
tim
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How on earth does a company like Yell end up with over £2bn in debt? They hardly need major capital or R&D investment.
by borrrowing money to buy up other similar companies
tim
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What about Battersea power station, blighting 40 acres of London for over 30 years.
THAT is madness.
What is madness is the stupid amount of money that successive (failed) developers have wanted when selling it on.
BPS and surroundings could have easily been developed into profitable housing if the price expected for the land reflected the liability that came with it, but as is common in such circumstances the owner of land with a LB on it wanted full value for the land and expected some philanthropic party to pick up the cost of looking after the LB.
tim
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There's no question that LEDs are less efficient than sodium. For an equivalent light output energy costs will be higher.
The difference is in lamp replacement costs which are drastically lower for LED, as they should last at least 10 years, with replacement recommended at 15 years.
LEDs are also switchable and dimmable, so brightness can be turned down after midnight saving energy (something not possible with sodium).
But can be achieved by turning alternative ones off :-(
tim
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Someone at the bank MUST have known something. The information was withheld, it was simple fraud.
But the point was (wrt RBS) they didn't.
They paid over the odds for that Dutch bank on the assumption that it wasn't infected with US sub-prime loans and then when they opened the books found that it was.
Someone at the Dutch bank may have lied, but the people at RBS were (only) negligent
tim
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I agree I would if I were to insist on using an agent. But there is no longer any compelling need for that unless I want a particular flat. Landlords are now able to avoid EAs, and many advertise directly.
This depends upon where yu live (and whast you want).
IME your chances of getting a self contained purpose built property in the shires, any way other than through an agent is next to nil. Even rooms in shared houses in that locality is difficult
tim
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How would I change ASTs? I'd make sure that the landlord could only be a large, well regulated commercial concern, preferably backed by a UK pension fund or similar that was looking for a low yielding asset paid out like an inflation proof perpetuity and paid out in sterling. The kind of chancers that we presently have (sorry "investing landlords") would have to put up with security of tenure and rent controls or take their financial acumen and turn a buck somewhere else. (More difficult to do without a 9:1 gearing ratio care of BM Solutions or some other state owned BTL lender). What would that do to market availability? It would probably improve it.
On 5% yields - never gonna happen
tim
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According to who? The newspapers on their "campaign"?
I'll admit there may be issues that the police can't be bothered / don't know the law but i don't see how changing the law helps that situation
Criminal Law Act 1977
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/contents
More specifically:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/7
As to the penalties:
OK,
so why ist'n it working then?
tim
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Nimbyism is a valid ideology at the local level. Stop that nasty new factory being built, send it somewhere horrible and working-class like Essex instead - and nothing is lost. The taxes raised on that factory will still be shared between the whole country.
If we had real localism, it would be different. If councils kept all the taxes raised on new homes/new factories, then there would be a strong counter to Nimbys, as local councils could clearly explain the financial benefits of new construction.
There's no demand for new factories and when there is there is little problem finding somewhere to build them (because brownfield locations next to motorways are actually preferable).
The demand for simplified planning is coming from:
1) Multi-national retailers who want 100% of shops to be out of town superstores - do you want this?
2) Developers who want to build 4 bed detached properties in the middle of an idyllic farmer’s field because they know that they can make ten times the profit building them there instead of shoe-horned in between streets of 2 bed terraces. Personally I don't think that we should remove planning restrictions just so that a very very few can make a windfall profit
3) People who want to build mega polluting facilities such as power stations - do you want one of these next to you?
tim
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Do you think that a broken lock is worth £5000, being threatened with death by the armed forces and 6 months in prison, if it's already been fixed?
But it's not the broken lock.
It's the inconvenience and legal costs that you have forced upon the real owner to recover their property, that's the issue.
No-one has the right to do this, and it is quite right that doing so is a crime IMHO
tim
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Go to the right hand side of the page half way down;
7%
Yes, my house is my pension
7%
I plan to sell my house to fund a large part of my retirement
20%
I may downsize, but any profits from selling my house are a bonus
65%
No
391 votes
You do have to put this into the context of somthing like 50% not having any pension provison at all
tim
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That's the same as selectively and arbitarily
You agree that it's evil to attack the innocent in this way though, right?
I don't regard someone who has broken into someone elses property and squatted there, as innocent (FSVO breaking in)
tim
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Why would he lie?
He could simply be "mistaken" about what squatting actually is.
Just like more or less everyone on this thread (actually interested people) and everyone in the media.
Then the police wont have done their job properly when he "reports" the crime.
Do you really think that they will arrange to turn up mob-handed at the property on the LL's say-so, without first asking "is/was this person your tenant"?
tim
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It's going to be like the fox hunting laws. It will be used selectively and somewhat arbitrarily. It will create a heap of work for police and CPS, and a steady income stream for lawyers.
No it won't. It will be used when the owner shouts loudly enough!
And I doubt that most people will expect this law to result in many convictions. Summary eviction is what they want and, more often than not, the case will be dropped once they get that.
tim
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Not if it's your home eg you're away on holiday as Bruce Banner was worried about. This was a criminal offence before the law was changed and the police could have arrested the squatters.
The difficulties experienced by people who have suffered this suggest that it isn’t (a criminal offence)
If you think otherwise please point us to the statute that includes it
tim
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So the squatters will lie but the landlords won't.
Because lying as a (first) defence is not a crime in itself (though it might get you a longer sentence for the substantive crime).
Lying when reporting a crime is.
And the LL has to take the risk that he will get found out 1 nano-second after the police knock on the tenant's door because the person he is lying about has keep one of the long list of documents that I have already supplied, that will prove he is lying.
tim
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I read an article in one of those wannabe authors magazines about Amazons self publishing system for it's kindle platform. Basically you upload your masterpiece, along with some kind of artwork and it's job done. No publisher, no printer, no distributor and no bookshop.
But the thing that did surprise me is that even with amazon's prices being about half or less than those of the bookshops the authors get twice as much in royalties from amazon than they do with the main publishers.
So the incentive is there for the authors to throw in their lot with Amazon- the only problem being how to stand out in the crowd of all those other wannabe authors.
Though I presume it's a different model
Authors of printed books get paid their royalty on the total print run whether it sells or not
Presumably with amazon they only get a royalty payment based upon actual sales
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That's a totally arbitrary analysis. You've assumed that AST law has to be as it is and cannot be reformed. You've further assumed that of all the possible arrangements that are in theory possible only two "choices" can actually exist, (neglecting most obviously a mixture of those two choices).
Clearly AST did correlate to an increase in the amount of PRS housing. At the same time it has correlated with an improvement in the quality of much of that PRS housing. However, that does not preclude the possibility that ASTs have struck the balance between tenants and landlords interest too far in landlords' favour.
That may be true, but IMHO the one thing that ASTs did that opened up the market was the removal of security of tenure.
LLs do not want to rent to tenants that they cannot get rid of as it buggers up their exit strategy. Having a sitting tenant devalues the property that they reside in, so you don't want to sell on with one.
And ISTM that it's imposssible to have security of tenure without rent controls, as otherwise a LL could circumvent the security problem by jacking up the rent until the tenant can't pay. And investing LLs aren't prepared to let with rent controls.
So what part of the AST terms could be modified in tenant's favour without affecting market availability?
tim
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so BTL is a poor investment, unless the tenants have few rights for the cash?
You need to try that again.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make
tim
Osborne Booed At The Paralympics
in House prices and the economy
Posted
The problem is that the Tories (to a man) believed it themselves.
If they hadn't they would have let Gordo in with his minority governent to dig us into an ever bigger hole before riding to the rescue to get us out
tim