The Property Sales People

When everyone is diving in then it's probably best not to be buying. The reverse is often true but Mike Woodfine from The Money Centre advises would be investors on the correct attitude to borrowing mortgage money. Read the Yorkshireman's advice here  http://bit.ly/arQLwu  !

Tory Minister Vows to End Era of House Price Booms The latest nonsense to issue from the mouth of a Con-Dem minister has left me agitated, not to say irritated! The Daily Mail of 13th October reported Grant Shapps’, the Housing Minister, speech to the Housing Market Intelligence conference. Read in full here http://bit.ly/dpGL4K if you are suffering from low blood pressure. He stated: “...middle class families ... should not rely on their homes to fund retirement”. We have had a Labour Government mount a several billion pound raid on pension funds, a stock market lose our pension funds a fortune and now we have a Tory telling us that property as a pension is a mortal sin! I suppose if you are an MP or a senior civil servant then you won’t need to worry about the investment in your property as you have a gold plated, brass constructed pension that the middle-classes have, and are still being asked, to fund from their heavily taxed income, whilst paying into their poorly performin...

It feels to me like the UK property market is holding it's breath waiting for the public spending cuts to finally be announced. In a late August blogpost I stated my irritation that the cuts were announced but not going to be implemented or details given until October. Well, in advance of the actual announcements, the BBC have created a page on their website where you can check out how resilient your area may be. This is based on a number of factors to create to a figure between 1 and 324. 1 being most resilient and 324 least. East Cambridgeshire scores 45 whilst nearby Fenland 235 and South Cambridgeshire 10! Check out the site here: http://bbc.in/aY28rC

At the last minute we are getting our sash windows painted this week. The windows are hardwood replicas of the original Victorian ones, complete with sash cords and brass pulley wheels and were made by R S Button Joinery in 2003. This is the second time they have been painted since then so I feel they were a good investment. Luckily we were able to use the old-style narrow gap double glazed units to keep the style correct and not have over-large glazing bars. English Heritage have advice on sash windows  here  http://bit.ly/aQVYOH

This article was published in the Telegraph and is headlined  Tips for selling your house this summer I  think the comments and tips hold good for the Autumn while we wait for the 'Cuts'  and really any other season of the year there is something to glean from this collection of agent's suggestions. http://bit.ly/cu9f4i

As I write this it is nearly the end of August and the rain, which hasn't stopped all night, is still pouring down on a bedraggled Market Place. Stallholders are regularly pushing up their canvas roofs to send a cascade of water over the ground. Depressing? Just a bit, maybe, but look on the bright side. We will soon be in September with the throngs of bored children heading back into the arms of their welcoming teachers to continue their studies towards the next crop of A* GCSE's and A levels. What of the property market, which is now looking towards early Autumn? The coalition government announced mid Summer that they would be making their main 'Cuts' in the Autumn and I feel that the usual holiday season lull has been intensified by the prospect of this happening. If you tell a population that there is pain to come then they batten down the hatches and wait and see. The recent retail figures and mortgage approval figures may bear this out to a degree. Once people ...

John Phelps, a former property correspondent for the Cambridge Evening News and a property journalist for more than 30 years, has just published his first novel: Agent From Hell. He reassures me when he aserts " I have never met an estate agent like Theo Salter and, in any case, the book is not an agent's manual... it is meant to entertain!" Priced at £8.99 it can be ordered from bookshops or from Matador Publishing. Follow this link for review and details http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1142