hra
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Posts posted by hra
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There are a million reasons why ppl contact us and it's rarely because of economic (personal or macro) reasons. Ppl will always :
- Divorce
- Die
- Move for job
- Move for kids
- Move for good
- exit investment
- Move to set up new business
- have financial difficulties
- have chains break
- not want to use agents
- not want neighbours to know
Not in that order, I sincerely hope ...
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I was talking about the income (e.g. building society interest) arising from the capital once you have realised the sale, in addition to any CGT, particularly as the investment income will continue beyond the year when CGT arose. In fact the situation mainly applies to owner-occupier STRs who were not previously getting any income from their property. Selling say a £250K property and earning £12,000 a year in interest sounds great when you offset it against the rent you have to pay on a similar property, say £775pcm until you factor in the tax burden which when combined with other income could easily be 40%. When people were talking on this thread about sellers deferring realising their profits, this struck me as a possible reason.
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Van, you're quite right but I sold two properties at once! The CGT I'm referring to is of course that linked to whichever property wasn't my PPR (subject to tax advice). I had taken into account the worst-case CGT hit but my point about taxation of further investment income arising from the profits after the sale (and the knock-on effect on other earnings) still applies to anyone, selling their PPR or not.
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This also raises an unfortunate point about the investment strategy of STRs who are still earning, since not only will they have to pay CGT but the investment income on the profit they've realised will push them further towards, or into, the higher rate tax bracket. The equation of capital growth versus building society interest doesn't look quite so attractive when you realise you're paying 40% tax on the money coming in to pay your rent, or that you will be taxed at 40% even if you take a part-time McJob to pay your council tax.
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This isn't the kind of thing I'd do of course, but someone could quite easily scan in a few property particulars from the local paper, then edit them to add PRICE REDUCTION banners, amend the asking prices appropriately (by a lot!), get the estate agent's logo off the web and paste the lot into an A4-format flyer with some suitably wishy-washy title and some inane blurb about realistic expectations in the current uncertainty of the economic climate blah blah. Such flyers could quite easily and cheaply be produced and quietly left in the magazine racks which a lot of estate agents have outside for their freebie newspapers.
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Nope. In fact invesment banking and legal are next on the outsourcing list.
I'm told it's already started in investment banking - quite apart from the outsourcing of their IT functions - with some of the research activities being outsourced as much as 2 years ago.
Even value-added jobs related to publishing, where the work involves detailed editing as well as just typesetting, are disappearing off to India.
The rising bottom-line cost and complexity of living here and running a business (in terms of stealth taxes and new regulations) is hardly likely to help, to put it mildly.
I know, why not outsource Tony Blair. I'm sure you wouldn't have to pay someone too much in rupees to start the odd war here and there, grin inanely, say "I'm a pretty straightforward kind of guy" and pick off one's political and media opponents one by one and consign them to the great and growing political incorrectness graveyard.
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From my experience things can drag out even without a chain. I sold my 1-bed flat last year to an investment buyer with no chian, but the sale kept getting delayed because their finance wasn't properly in place.
My experience too. An investment buyer who is perhaps dependent on a mortgage broker and who may have to go through one or more lengthy iterations of getting an acceptable finance deal, is hardly guaranteed to produce a speedy or reliable transaction. It doesn't cost them very much to put in an offer, "reserve" the property in effect and then faff around. What the vendor needs to aim towards is a survey date, at which point the buyer will have committed more money - and if necessary the vendor can set a reasonable cutoff date for this beyond which they will re-market.
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Thanks for the link, M21er. This puts their sudden appearance in the Best Buys table a bit more in context - although the 5.65% is actually a reduction from their previous rate (which I didn't realise and which they didn't offer for very long anyway) the other major players seem to have reduced theirs more substantially.
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Pompey, if you have good tenants and have relatively little hassle and a reasonable yield and good management in place (all big ifs) you could of course hang onto the properties despite moving to NZ. It also gives you a fallback if you ever want to return to the UK.
Alternatively you could try floating one at least of the properties on the market for sale or at the very least talking to neighbours and estate agents about the local market, but you would risk upsetting any tenants you have and narrowing down your options still further if you eventually find you can't sell easily.
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there have been reports of a growing gun culture in reading. Is this spreading or hype?
It's basically true, though most FTB'ers are finding even a compact yet affordable Glock or Beretta is beyond their reach these days and their parents are having to help out by MEWing from longer-held assets such as Lugers and Lee-Enfield rifles. But on the other hand I'm sure I saw a programme on TV "Your place in the Gun" or somesuch about a dewy-eyed aspirational couple trading up from their trusty if somewhat dated Heckler-Koch which has tripled in value over the last 10 years to a brand-new "executive" Milan anti-tank missile with laser-guided sight and 2 deceptively spacious boxes of ammunition. So perhaps the market hasn't peaked yet after all?
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Reading's particular appeal is that it has one of the fastest commutes into London, given its distance from the capital.
True, but that used to be a lot truer than it is now. It used to be advertised as 22 minutes from London but timetables have mysteriously become somewhat more generous over time and that advert has long disappeared. The main problem is deteriorating reliability and its various financial and quality-of-life consequences as anyone who's been caught in a 5-hour delay at Paddington, due to yet another signal failure at Southall (somehow it always seems to be Southall) will tell you. Job prospects in London, particularly the City, aren't quite what they were in the '90s either.
Why pay 200K or more for a commuter's executive apartment in Reading when you could get a riverside flat in EC4 for not all that much more, and gloat every time there was a rail strike or massive delay.
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Not quite the same choice of jobs up here
There's not quite the same choice of jobs in Reading either, with the downfall, shall I say, of "Wildcom" (Worldcom) and jobs from the Pru and elsewhere migrating overseas, and that's before considering the recent fate of small software houses and IT contractors of course. Wildcom's move to Reading used to be specifically cited by local estate agents as a reason the market had boomed so much a couple of years ago, and now look at it.
Mind you, there's still plenty of job prospects in the Police Complaints Commission - they're doing a lot of business in Reading from what I read in the local papers.
Back to the luxury apartments in Reading: I think 200K is roughly what newbuilds of that general kind were about 3 years ago and even then I thought they seemed vastly overpriced in relation to rental yield. There's still a huge amount of luxury executive-type new building going elsewhere on in Reading a good deal of which is in the most unlikely and undesirable of areas, and even those with a "river view" usually have a "yob view" as well. I wouldn't buy one even at £150K.
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then fixed rate savings will be the best bet
I've been saying that for several months myself, and mentioned it previously in this thread. I am quite pleased about the 5.61% 1-year bond I took out in June, noting that the building society appears to have reduced the interest rate on new issues to 5.25% recently. (Well, at least I'll be pleased if they stay solvent until next June).
But there seems to be a new player heading the Moneyfacts Best Buys for fixed interest investment as of today: the London Scottish Bank. Anyone know anything about them (owned by, reputation etc)?
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Yes, there are marginally better instant-access Internet savings rates but not by all that much now. For a short period until 1st October, Birmingham Midshires were offering 5.4% on basically the same account as the one I think you're describing. What they seem to have done as of 1st October is re-issue their e-savings product (note the 'issue 2' in their description) with a reduced first-year introductory bonus as far as I can make out. Very probably you can still get better rates in a 1-year bond. Then there's always vintage wine or Outer Mongolian property etc.
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By the way who invents these crazy words?
Well this doesn't exactly answer your question but apparently "gazump" is thought to be taken from the Yiddish word "gezumph" meaning to cheat or overcharge.
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what industry IS safe then?????????????????????
Haven't seen any sign of Kirstie and Phil being replaced by a call centre in Bangalore yet. Or maybe that's the next series?
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1) Market view: Gremlin. There are a lot of reasons for getting out of the property market which are under-represented on this forum.
2) Market postion: Double STR: sold home of 15 years plus investment property simultaneously a few months ago.
3) Area of Country: Berkshire/Oxfordshire borders
4) Occupation and Employer: Confidential.
5) Highest Level of Education: MA plus postgraduate qualifications.
6) Age (or age group): 42.
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Doesn't anyone agree that it's offensive to have to put up with ads showing people getting caught for not paying the fee etc & knowing that all that money is wasted on administering the system
Even more offensive is their treatment of people who have genuinely ceased to need a licence and can easily prove it.
First it's surprisingly difficult to obtain a part-refund of your licence if you wish to cancel it because you don't need a TV for several months (e.g. in temporary accommodation for an indefinite period with your furniture in store as I was earlier this year). You actually have to sign a firm guarantee that you won't even re-apply for a new licence again at any point before the expiry date of your old licence, however long away that is. It isn't good enough to say that you are not quite sure when you'll be moving into somewhere with a TV again or even that you "probably" won't.
In my case, the BBC didn't believe me and I had to go through about 3 iterations of correspondence including documentary proof I'd offered at the outset.
My own stay in TV-less temporary accommodation lasted several months during which I'd have been paying the BBC for nothing had I not signed that guarantee and abided by it then and since, even though I did eventually move somewhere permanent before the expiry date. In the end, I simply disposed of my TV (I happen to agree with a lot of the comments about bias and propaganda too, and the licencing issue was really just the last straw)
When I moved to my new permanent address, I filled in the usual licence reminder, saying I didn't have a TV, and received an acknowledgement (with plenty of warnings about people who tell porkies). Two weeks later I received a rather unpleasant red-letter reminder, accusing me of not replying to the original notice. A mistake, of course.
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Rightmove will be a good indication of cost to buy compared to cost to rent
though if you check these areas: Clifton, Cotham,Redland,Henleaze,Bishopstone
and Holby.
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When I sold my investment flat this year, I told the estate agent I hadn't been able to find a new tenant and even showed him my sums showing it wouldn't be worthwhile even if I did (compared with the interest I'd gain on the capital if I sold). He still managed to sell the property - to another investor seeking to rent it out.
I was also fairly up-front about some of major issues affecting the block as a whole, that might put potential buyers off and this was very beneficial because the estate agents often deal with other properties in the same block and were able to reassure me and market the property from a position of experience.
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Kirstie also didn't specifically say she was referring to the property market (it could be a market in anything, even hats, that was supposedly about to come back up in September). Also there's nothing to say what the hat's made out of e.g. perhaps she's getting a chocolate one commissioned. And she didn't even say when she'd eat it.
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"September, mid-september, we'll see the market comes back up. If it doesn't come back up this time, I'll eat my hat." Kirsty Allsop.
She didn't say which year.
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I'm all in favour of customising the board's skin(s) especially given comments at various times about font sizes and logos etc. but perhaps a separate skin should be set up so that any changes can at least be trialled via the selector menu without altering the default skin - and it gives people a choice too.
BTW I've just noticed that "My Assistant" isn't working: "The requested URL /forum/index.{ibf.vars.php_ext} was not found on this server." Anyone else having the same issue?
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Mine's a gremlin.
I see this forum has a new feature to help hackers - the debug feature's been left switched on.
It's our Birthday......HPC is one year old
in House prices and the economy
Posted
I may not have made it onto anyone's popularity list (gremlins probably rarely do in the circumstances) but thanks to Webmaster for my deluxe Housepricecrash fridge magnet which is now in pride of place. I wonder what my landlord will make of it.