Tenubracon

Christ, I hadn't heard about this. They teally hate tenants, don't they? Do you have a link?

Hi Brix, only just seen your reply. That house is just round the corner from me. It's not that big, built in the garden of a much nicer (and larger) victorian place. That is a truly unbelieveable hike in price from 463 to 650 in two and a bit years, the greed is just sickening. Still, on the plus side, the sale seems to have fallen through today.

Has he registered your deposit with the tenancy deposit scheme (TDS)? If he has, he should have provided you with the paperwork within 14 days fo the start of the contract. If he hasn't, you can claim three times th evalues of the deposot back from him, assuming that you have a standard assured shorthold tenancy (AST). I imagine that might piss him off a little bit more than a few fish down the backs of radiators. If you are going to pursue the TDS route, make sure you document everything and DO NOT take any kind of petty revenge. Check through the old posts on here, some people have already successfully used the TDS route, and have provided info on how to go about it.

Hi Gordon. This was on Derwent Rd, not the best street as it's right next to the 'village' (ie: Tesco's). Still not much selling from what I can see. Lots of new stock, sales falling through, and trivial 2-5% cuts. We did a second viewing on a place we were considering putting in a -25% offer on, but we realised that even at that price it was too much as it needed a fair bit of work and it was far from being our ideal home. It's been on the market for a year and only under offer once in that time, just after it first appeared for sale. I told the agent it was way over priced, using LR data to back me up. He tried to argue the toss for a bit (out of habit, I think) before conceding that the owner wanted too much. It's little compensation that all the LR data can do is help you win an argumant with an EA, though.

You can take the dog if you make like a pharaoh.

The shops in general seem to be very quiet here in Eastbourne. I overheard an employee of a well-known fast food chain that begins with M today. Her friend asked her what time she finished work and she replied that it was usually 3 o'clock, but it'd been so quiet recently that she's been finishing at 12 - just before lunchtime, when you'd expect it to be busier.

Lowering corporation tax ... just like Ireland.

On the Today programme I was hoping they'd ask exactly this question. Inseated, they asked who'd get the profits if they sold in a year or two.

There have been a lot of sales falling through, though, and a fair amount of new stock, which can only be good. We've viewed a few places recently and I have to say I am still very surprised at some of the prices being asked. The EAs have ranged from stupidly bullish to fairly realistic, with one EA genuinely shocked at the price of a place we asked him about. We were viewing a place in Meads, and coincidentally, the same agent had just taken on the place opposite. He called through to find out the price as it was a similar size to the place we were viewing - he couldn't disguise his surprise at the answer, which was almost double the place he was showing us round. This came on today at the All Saints development: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-33202559.html 750k for a flat in Eastbourne. If this sells, then I will give up. '

Nah, she's a smart woman, and she gets it really. It's just that sometimes, as others have said, the way in which large debt became normalised in the last decade has distorted people's sense of reality. She just needs an occasional nudge to remind her!

I'm going for 'stupid liar'. My other half is currently keen to view a few places because they're 'good value' at a quarter of a million. This is for a very average victorian terrace in a not very glamorous SE seaside town. I keep having to remind her that this is not monopoloy money we're talking about here and over 25 years, we'd have paid the bank the best part of half a million quid for the privilege of small rooms, a tiny garden, neighbours directly attached on both sides, and no parking. HALF A MILLION QUID!

Some fine comedy pricing: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-16308429.html Been on the market since June last year, so what do they do? Lop off a bedroom (it's now two, not three - it's so easy to lose one, isn't it) and put up the price from £225k to £249K! Property Bee required to see the details. Quarter of a million quid for a pokey two-bed bungalow! We really have a way to go yet ...

Hmm, I must have missed that version of the show.

What the hell are Phil and Kirsty for, any way? Any fool can find a few houses on the net, and theyclearly can't negotiate - In this week's episode, they managed to get the price down from £450k to £440. That's about 2% on a property that had beeen on the market for two years. Two years! Who the hell would hire these people?

You sure this is the site for you?

I guess the busiest Jan in three years is still going to be pretty quiet given the three years in question!

They were offering about 4.5 joint as a maximum.

True, I didn't think to mention that. Damn!

We've been given notice by our landlords so we're considering our options for the next move. Luckily, we have a good few months to make our decision about whether to rent again or buy. Wanting to act with knowledge on my side, I called various mortgage companies this morning and ended up having an interesting conversation with the agant at the Halifax, who said: They'd had their busiest January in three years They'd lend to me with just a 10 % deposit The 10 % deposit offer was not available for new builds and newly developed houses as the sellers generally charged a premium for these. I asked how they'd know if a house had been developed, she said they check the electoral roll to see if the sellers ever lived there and the LR to see when it last sold, etc. And that the surveyors could 'just tell', which made me chuckle - twigs in vases, rented furniture, and so on, I guess. The agent wasn't bullish, but it was when I said that it seemed that the lending criteria are starting to relax that she started talking about the busy January. It'll be interesting to see if the Halifax figures for this month bear this out. It's also nice to see that they agree that developers are ripping folk off!

There's a fairly high possibility that this is a tactic to get you all worked up so that when you eventually call them back, you'll be more likely to offer more. I'd call them to check, but not offer more.

Craven by name ...

Here's the article, green shoots and all ... UK economic growth held up in February, figures to show The latest round of the purchasing managers' indexes (PMIs), which measure monthly changes in activity, should paint a more encouraging picture of the direction in which the economy is heading. The resilient data is expected to shore up economists' expectations that rates will rise in May by a quarter of a point, as the recovery will look better placed to withstand the impact. The last set of the Markit/CIPS PMIs prompted a sigh of relief as they showed that the two weaker sectors of the economy – services and construction – both bounced back in January, after contracting as the snow disrupted business in the previous month. That raised hopes that Britain would avoid plunging into a double-dip recession in the wake of the economy's shock contraction as the snow hit in the previous quarter. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Friday revised this fourth quarter fall in GDP further downwards, from 0.5pc to an even worse 0.6pc. Since the statisticians still think the bad weather wiped half a percentage point off growth, the new figure signalled that underlying recovery had not just stalled, but went into reverse. The data will have intensified the focus on the latest PMIs, as they will show whether the bounce-back is holding up or whether fundamental growth looks dangerously weak. The crucial survey will be Thursday's PMI for the service industries, which account for three quarters of total GDP and have suffered from the effects of shaky consumer confidence. Activity is expected to have kept growing, but at a slower rate. The PMI is expected to give an unspectacular but healthy reading of up to 54, after January's 54.5, where anything over the 50 mark points to growth. Manufacturing will stay the success story, after the latest industrial trends survey from the CBI confirmed that the sector's resurgence continues to gather pace. Factories are generally expected to have seen only a slight slowdown in activity, after hitting a record high of 62 in January, as exports kept improving. Construction, the sector most exposed to the December snow, is expected to have seen modest growth as it continued to catch up on work that was delayed.

It was unexpected, don't you know: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12577154

Without haste? Seriously, you should have no problem with this. Good luck.

Just saw this in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/17/nick-clegg-housing-benefit-cut-dropped "The government has dropped plans to impose a 10% cut in housing benefit on anyone unemployed for more than a year after a last-minute intervention by Nick Clegg. The cut was proposed in the June emergency budget, but will now not feature in the welfare reform bill published by Iain Duncan Smith. Last week the work and pensions secretary maintained that the 10% cut would be kept to give unemployed people an incentive to find work. But the measure was seen by many Liberal Democrats as punishing the poor twice. Clegg also feared that private sector landlords in areas of high unemployment would be reluctant to rent to jobseeker's allowance claimants if their housing benefit income was at risk of being reduced. Duncan Smith denied that the idea was dumped due to opposition from Clegg, insisting: "I am fully at one with Nick on this." He said he had decided not to press ahead with the cut because all of those affected by it would anyway be recruited on to the government's new back-to-work programmes. Duncan Smith told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "You won't see this in the bill for one very good reason - the more we looked at this, the more we reviewed the interplay between that reduction at 12 months and the universal credit and the work programme, it meant that all of those people were going to move on to the work programme anyway, so they would be having intensive help to get them back to work." It is also understood ministers have decided not to put carer's allowance, worth £55 a week, into the new universal credit system, after carers' organisations said it would increase means-testing and complexity. David Cameron and Duncan Smith will jointly launch the welfare bill, claiming that money being poured into a streamlined universal credit system will take 950,000 people – including 300,000 children – out of poverty. The government will also announce moves to reduce the flow of people – 300,000 a year – who leave work to claim sickness-related benefits. According to Duncan Smith, the new system will be simplified and result in nearly a million people being "lifted out of poverty" and around a million of the poorest Britons seeing increases of £25 a week as they return to work. "What will happen is British people will genuinely be able to get British jobs because they will be incentivised to take those jobs, we will expect them to take those jobs but work will pay better than benefits," he told BBC Breakfast. "A life on benefits will no longer be an option for somebody. After all, right now there are huge numbers of people sitting on benefits, sometimes in rented accommodation, that people who are working could never dream of affording. "That system has got to change. Fairness to the taxpayer as well." David Frost, chair of the British Chambers of Commerce, and Dame Carol Black, national director for health and work, will be asked to lead a review of what Cameron will describe as a "sicknote culture". In his speech the prime minister will argue that the "collective culture of responsibility – taken for granted 60 years ago – has in many ways been lost. You see it in the people who go off sick when they could work or the people who refuse job offer after job offer. "The benefit system has created a benefit culture. It doesn't just allow people to act irresponsibly, but often actively encourages them to do so. Sometimes they deliberately follow the signals that are sent out." Government sources said 2.7m households would be better off as a result of universal credit, and more than 1m would see an increase of over £25 a week, with 85% of the increase going to households with the lowest 40% of income. Transitional protection will ensure that there are – at least initially – no cash losers as universal credit is phased in from 2013. The shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne, said: "We'll support the government where it builds on our big reforms to sort out sickness benefits and get people who can work into work. "But welfare to work won't work without jobs. We need a plan B for the economy because yesterday's figures showed the private sector isn't creating jobs fast enough to pick up public sector job cuts." In other changes, disability living allowance will be reformed by the introduction of a personal independence payment for disabled people. There will also be measures to reduce fraud and error, including a single investigation service and a new mobile regional taskforce to investigate every claim in high fraud areas, along with civil penalties – £50 for lesser offences."