Property

Thursday

Taki

High life | 5 January 2017

Gstaad  New Year’s Eve was a Rhapsody in Blue, with a clarinet glissando that promised joys to come, and the Gershwin downbeat not registering until 6 a.m. The hangover was, of course, Karamazovian, but who the hell cares. I am finally solid again, and even the flu I caught on the trip over is on its last legs, lingering and as annoying as EU regulations, but no longer to be taken seriously. I had lots of close friends for dinner, but the new chalet was packed by the time I began slurring. Mind you, it’s during dreamlike moments such as those between midnight and dawn that wisdom strikes: there is

Tuesday

Keith Osborne

Buying a second property: what you need to know for 2017

If you’re planning on buying a second property this year, then help is at hand thanks to Spectator Money. Stamp duty costs, mortgage tax relief changes and the possible impact of Brexit are just a few things to consider when buying a second home, a holiday home or a buy-to-let in 2017. Price versus Value ‘Location, location, location’. This age-old saying still speaks volumes. When searching for a property, you’ll benefit in the long run if you do your homework at the outset. Infrastructural changes have a direct knock-on effect with property prices, as does the weather and local amenities, such as roads, schools and shops. If you can search out areas that

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Workers on boards: red herring from the 1970s or useful negotiating card?

‘We’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but workers as well,’ Theresa May declared in July. ‘I can categorically tell you that this is not about… the direct appointment of workers or trade union representatives on boards,’ she corrected herself in her CBI speech last month. ‘It will be a question of finding the model that works.’ But is there such a thing? The case was set out in a recent TUC paper, All Aboard, which argues that worker participation would encourage ‘a long-term approach to decision-making’ and ‘help challenge groupthink’. Support is claimed from the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane: ‘If power resides in the

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 6 October 2016

Tenement Scots John Cleese referred to the editor of this magazine as a ‘tenement Scot’. Do more Scots live in tenements? — The term tenement became associated in Scotland with 14-storey blocks built in Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries. One collapsed in 1861, killing 35 residents and leading to an Improvement Act which largely did away with the old blocks. — Today, 38% of homes in Scotland are flats or maisonettes, markedly higher than the 21% in England and Wales. But only 14,900 (0.6%) are ‘buildings in multiple occupancy’, with shared facilities like the original tenements. More than a landslide Hungarians voted by 98% to 2% to reject

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Brexit spooks the markets, but the housing crisis will swing more votes

‘I rang and said can I have a council house, I’ve nowhere to go, an’ the bloke said no you can’t, we need them all for t’Romanians,’ was a remark offered by a fellow patient, known to me as Fat Lad, when I was hospitalised three years ago. ‘I’m telling you, I’m the biggest Ukip supporter there is…’ he went on, illuminating how — unnoticed by the comfortable classes — a shortage of social and affordable housing was helping to fuel the national mood that eventually led to the Leave vote. Belatedly, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid has had a Damascene moment: ‘Tackling the housing shortage is not about political expediency,’

Friday

Ed West

Foreign investors aren’t to blame for London’s housing crisis

I hate gentrification; my area was so much cooler when there were people openly selling drugs on the high street, my neighbours’ house had a mattress outside and the nice restaurants needed bouncers so the diners weren’t constantly harassed by crack addicts. Now it’s all just nice coffee shops, other broadsheet readers and arthouse cinemas. But don’t worry, for the Mayor of London is on the case, launching an inquiry into how much London land is being bought up by overseas investors and, as the Guardian reports, ‘the scale of gentrification and rising housing costs in the capital‘. Sadiq Khan says there are ‘real concerns’ about the surge in the number of homes

Thursday

Mark Mason

Aga can’t

Earlier this year my partner paid several hundred thousand pounds for an Aga. There’s no other way of putting it. A major cause of her excitement about our new house was the presence in its kitchen of the whacking great oven. I, on the other hand, was unsure how I felt about it — Aga-nostic, if you like. Six months later I’m sick of the bloody thing. What’s more, I’ve worked out why Aga lovers go on about them so much. For those of you fortunate enough never to have encountered one of these beasts, the facts are these. An Aga has to be kept on constantly, sapping your fuel

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 September 2016

What is happening to estate agents? Or let me put it another way. If the professional classes thought they were going to escape unscathed from ‘free movement of people’ then they were wrong. I feel it is only fair to warn the office workers and the suited and booted that their salaries are no longer safe from the Eurovision job contest. I know this because I have been trying to sell my flat for a while and a part of the problem has been that the agent put in charge of selling it was a young girl who, while sweet, lacked the ideal vocab range. I overheard her doing a

Thursday

Alex Massie

Highland sting

There is no party in Britain quite as fake as the Scottish National Party. The SNP, now entrenched in its dominance of Scottish politics, imagines itself a revolutionary force for change. Its mission to break up Britain bolsters that impression. But if the SNP campaigns with zeal, it governs with caution. These are the most conservative revolutionaries on the planet. On health, education and taxes, the SNP stresses continuity. The party saves its radicalism for issues the public considers trivial. One is Trident. Another is land reform. According to an opinion poll earlier this year, just 3 per cent of voters consider nuclear weapons one of the three most important

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Is the sale of our only global-scale tech firm to Japan a vote of confidence in the UK?

It’s easy to see why Arm Holdings, the UK’s only global-scale internet technology company, looked worth a quick £24 billion bet by Softbank of Japan. At $1.32 to the pound, the price is a lot cheaper than it could have been before polls closed on 23 June, when sterling stood at $1.50; that made it easy for Softbank to offer a fat premium over last Friday’s closing Arm share price — and harder for Arm’s board to say no. As for Arm’s business, it’s unlikely to be knocked by Brexit since its microchips are priced in dollars and sold chiefly to smartphone makers in Asia and the US. And its prospects —

Liam Halligan

The bust that wasn’t

It has been a month since the UK voted to leave the European Union — but something is missing. Where is the economic collapse? What of EUpocalypse Now? Where is the Brexageddon that we were promised? To the shock of many — not least business titans who bankrolled the Remain campaign — the instant collapse doesn’t seem to be happening. The UK economy is, for now at least, taking Brexit in its stride. The oft-predicted job losses? During the three weeks from 23 June, job listings were up 150,000 compared to the same period last year according to Reed Group, a recruitment consultant. ‘That’s an 8 per cent rise,’ says

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The new PM is right to want boardroom reform, but how can she make it happen?

I spent Sunday at the Sage Gateshead watching an epic performance of Götterdämmerung (I declare an interest, as a trustee of Opera North), so my head was full of it as I braced for more political backstabbing and immolation on Monday. That was very much the way it went as Andrea Leadsom fell, Theresa May rode her horse into the ring of flame that is the forthcoming Brexit negotiation, and Jeremy Corbyn, still clutching Labour’s tarnished ring, was dragged underwater by Angela Eagle, unlikeliest of Rhinemaidens. Enough of the Wagner mash-up: what really caught my ear during the brief moment between Mrs May’s campaign launch and coronation was her attack

Saturday

Henry Jeffreys

Is Lewisham really so ’orrible?

When we said we were thinking of moving to Lewisham four years ago, the locals in our pub in Bethnal Green thought we were mad. ‘It’s fuckin’ ’orrible,’ one of them said. Coming from people who’d lived all their lives in the East End, this was worrying. Nevertheless, swayed by a cheap ex-council flat, we moved to a hill that runs between Blackheath and Lewisham station. A good way to imagine Lewisham town centre is as the village in Asterix, surrounded on all sides by the forces of gentrification. Hither Green, Ladywell, Forest Hill and Brockley have delicatessens and artisan bakeries. Deptford has hipsters whereas Blackheath is proper posh, the

Monday

Lara Prendergast

Could Brexit solve the housing crisis?

It is, at times, unclear that George Osborne is aware that the under-30s are voting in this EU referendum. When he talks about house prices plummeting post-Brexit, he talks as if this will strike fear into everyone’s hearts. For older people seeking to downsize, this might be true – but for almost everyone else, it’s not. And when I hear the In side arguing that we should all be terrified of Brexit because it will cause house prices to fall, I can’t help but wonder if this is the best single reason to vote ‘out’. For most people my age, one of the worst changes in Britain has been the

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 7 April 2016

Squire power The village of West Heslerton in Yorkshire was put up for sale at £20 million after its owner, Eve Dawnay, died. Other villages still largely owned by a local squire: — Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, owned by the W.H. Smith family until 2007 when it was bought by the neighbouring Culden Faw estate, which owns 50 cottages in the village as well as the shop and pub. — Bantham, Devon. An estate consisting of 21 houses, a golf course and 589 acres was bought in 2014 by a businessman, Nicholas Johnston, having been advertised for £11.5 million. The National Trust wanted to buy it but were outbid. — New Earswick,

Tuesday

Theodore Dalrymple

British expats in the EU fear a stronger euro far more than they fear Brexit

Whenever I return to England from my home in France I am struck at once by the number of grossly fat people of beached-whale proportions, by the almost militant vulgarity of much of the population, and by the shabbiness of the infrastructure. This suggests to me that our deeper problems are unrelated to our membership of the EU, and that we have neither the will nor the ability to solve them. This is not to say, however, that our membership serves our national interest. Brexit is possible, though I confess that I’ll believe it when I see it, given the integrity of our political class. Would Brexit affect my position

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 18 February 2016

Selling with honesty An Essex estate agent sold a flat in Westcliff-on-Sea for £22,500 over the £125,000 asking price after advertising it with the words: ‘Wipe your feet on the way out…this property is full of rubbish, there is mould on the walls and I think there may even be fleas.’ The original honest estate agent was Roy Brooks, who operated from Chelsea in the 1960s and won fame by describing properties he was selling with such accolades as ‘erstwhile house of ill-repute’, ‘rather theatrical — in keeping with the pretentious style of the owner’ and ‘ten rather unpleasant rooms with slimy back yard’. The latter property, advertised for £4,650,

Thursday

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Investment: Buy to lose

Take a quick look at the UK buy-to-let market and you might find it tough to understand exactly what it is that makes it so very popular. Dealing with tenants is difficult and boring. House prices have a horrible tendency to go down as well as up (Londoners — ask anyone living in the north of England about this). And rents have long been so low relative to prices that getting a worthwhile net yield is all but impossible after costs. Given this, you might wonder, why on earth would 14.5 per cent of all mortgage lending in the UK in the third quarter of last year have been to

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 7 January 2016

A tax on empty dwellings Sir: Both the Conservative and Labour candidates (‘Battle for London’, 2 January) rightly see housing as the big issue in London’s mayoral election this year: Ukip and the Greens would probably say the same. But if one travels along the river at night and observes the large blocks of flats that appear to be almost empty, one wonders if there really is a problem. Anecdotal evidence says that the owners are mostly Chinese (but they could be Arabs, Russians, or others based abroad), who occupy these properties for little more than a week or a month in the year. We who live in London all

The Spectator

Through the roof

When David Cameron said this week that he is worried his children would not be able to afford to buy their own homes, he struck on one of the greatest economic problems of his premiership. The old British promise is that if you work hard and make the right decisions, you can advance in life and own your own home. This is the ladder that most aspire to climb. But for an entire generation, even the hope of home ownership is slipping out of view. A huge number of young Britons cannot hope to have the kind of life their parents enjoyed. The Prime Minister must know he is on dangerous