BTL

A landlord is somebody who gets deeply in debt to give you to have a roof over your head. Time for a Christmas card, after all? Sort of…

More evidence that house prices are really falling comes from the Nationwide building society, in its latest official house price index. While it tries to draw attention more to annual figures in the accompanying commentary, which are still very much up, the quarterly figures for January to March 2008 are dreadful. House prices haven’t fallen [...]

New government statistics reveal home ownership in the UK is the lowest it’s been for a decade. In London there are an incredible 110,000 fewer home owners than in 2001 (not that surprising if you’ve seen London prices recently). Blame buy-to-let.

THE SCENE: A beautiful couple – they might be models fresh from a home shopping catalogue photoshoot – relax in their sixth-floor two-bedroom, two-bathroom, new build apartment. He is in the kitchen area, mixing up mojitos on the island unit. She is on the balcony, gazing across the city landscape (an out-of-focus backdrop of railway [...]

“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.” Robert Frost Whether to buy your own home or not is a tricky question for anyone wanting financial freedom. Now that might seem to some a mad statement; in most English [...]

Buying a house in Britain today costs a lot more than renting it. Fair enough, you might think: Home owners have seen prices triple in the past decade, so it’s understandable that it should cost more to buy your suburban castle and so potentially profit than to merely rent it. But wait a minute: If [...]