Playing Property Snakes & Ladders

The rather interesting headline in todays Worthing Property Weekly was…”A Return To A More Steady Market”

Damn, damn, damn!  We all wanted another year of doom and gloom about house prices – never have there been so many empty houses with motivated sellers and prices being slashed.

The article goes on to say “The property market is correcting itself rather than heading for a spectacular crash, according to the National Association of Estate Agents.  It based it’s claims on information contained in the latest report by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors…….The house price falls are modest and the picture is still patchy with some areas of the country finding it tougher than others….credit crunch affected confidence….underlying factors that support property market remain:  low unemployment, historically low interest rates and a pent up demand for houses.”

As I say, Damn, Damn, Damn!  I was rather hoping for those 15-30% drops my friends (non-property investing) boyfriend is confidently predicting and I told you about last week.  On her usual entertaining note, Judith has written about her personal rather up and down property investing story here.

“My history with property investing is somewhat checkered to say the least. In 1979 my Dad lent me £500 towards buying my first home which cost £9,000 and on which Ken Livingstone, then Leader of the GLC, gave me a 100% mortgage. I sold the flat in 1983 for £21,000 and bought a house costing £43,000. I sold that in a sealed bid in 1987 for about £85,000 and bought a house for £125,000 and then rented it out in 1990 as an HMO (house of multiple occupancy) even before we knew what such a thing was, and bought a flat to live in costing another £125,000. So at that point I owned two properties worth a quarter of a million, following nothing better than instinct, naivete and native cunning.

And then interest rates went to 18% and I struggled manfully with the cashflow of my business in difficult market conditions and to pay both mortgages for about three years until I finally caved in and in 1992 both my homes were re-possessed and I found myself in debt to the tune of about £300,000 and facing bankruptcy. Snakes and Ladders. Back to Zero. Er, make that £300k below zero.

So, if I suffered so badly in the last “crash”, how are things different now?  Why am I buying, buying, buying and more to the point, how am I doing it?”

(Nicola’s note:  Our next Money Gym Presents day is on Property, and not only will the best thing since vienetta Ice Cream be presenting there – Greg Ballard – but Judith and myself will be sharing the “Top Five All Time Ways To Make Money From Property” – find out more here.) 

Judith says:  One of those ways is something we only came across this year, but has blown us – and many of our Money Gym clients – away.  Dave & Rick’s Cashflow Investor plan means you don’t acquire more assets – or “slumbering giants” as I call them – and don’t get me wrong… you do need some slumbering giants.

But what if you have no equity to leverage, no inheritance to invest, no savings deposits and no good credit rating? How are YOU going to make large lumps of cash in the property lane of the Wealth Highway?

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Wealth Coach Diaries: Nicola’s Week

Are you panicking about the property market?  Or just about the economy generally?  I was watching the news last night and right next to the headline about the awful building conditions of schools in China, a major contributory factor in the disaster out there, I spotted one that said “Banks pull the plug on buy-to-let landlords”.

So I went looking for it this morning.  Found it on Google of course at at The Times Online.  Here is just a snippet of this “good-times” article…By Lauren Thompson and Grainne Gilmore. 
 
“The era of the amateur landlord has all but ended, with banks effectively refusing to lend to new entrants to the buy-to-let market. Thousands of existing landlords also face huge increases in the cost of remortgaging, experts said yesterday. The warning came as HBOS, Britain’s biggest group of lenders, imposed the third increase in the cost of residential mortgages in as many weeks. Cheltenham & Gloucester, the fourth-biggest lender, also increased some of its rates for the second time in three weeks. First-time landlords, including parents eager to buy a house for their student children, will now find it almost impossible to enter the housing market. Lenders have stopped offering buy-to-let loans or severely tightened their lending criteria for prospective landlords and many of the existing one million buy-to-let mortgage holders approaching the end of their terms.

The development comes as senior figures in the housing industry predict up to two years of declining house prices. The problems in the buy-to-let market are compounded by fears that the target of many would-be landlords – apartment blocks in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Cardiff – are facing a rapid decline in their value.

Katie Tucker, of the broker John Charcol, said: “After another week of turmoil in mortgage markets, novice landlords now face huge difficulties securing a loan, and thousands of existing landlords coming to the end of fixed-rate deals will find it very hard and very expensive to switch mortgage providers if they have not built up at least 75 per cent equity in their buy-to-let property.” This week Abbey withdrew virtually its entire range of buy-to-let mortgages, leaving only an expensive fixed-rate deal of 6.99 per cent for direct customers…..”

READ MORE HERE >>> (if you can bear it!)

Notice they are talking about amateur landlords (none of our Money Gym-ers can be called that), about how new build are going to be worst hit (we always steer our cleints well away from over-priced new builds) and I have to ask what on earth any self respecting landlord would be doing getting their buy-to-let from a high street building society – really, I have no idea…………

However, the “Related links” section included “Housing gloom: the silver lining” and if you need cheering up you can read that one here where David Budworth says

“A falling property market does have some benefits! The storm clouds looming over the housing market grow darker every day. But for some aspiring homeowners there could be a silver lining, with bargains emerging as asking prices tumble and sellers become ever more desperate to get properties off their hands. It takes courage to buy at a time when some commentators are predicting that house prices could fall a further 15 per cent. Even Britain’s biggest lenders and surveyors, which have an interest in talking up the market, now admit that they expect property prices to fall. Asking prices for properties new to the market were down by an average of 0.1 per cent over the past month, according to Rightmove.co.uk, the property website. In some regions the slide has been even more severe: in the North West prices fell by 1.4 per cent and in London by 0.9 per cent. And it could become much worse. David Miles, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, says that up to 1.2 million people – one in ten homeowners – could be pushed into negative equity, where their mortgages are greater than the value of their property.

As the gloom spreads, though, bargains are beginning to emerge. Michael Holt, of Charterhouse Standard Holdings, has been buying residential property on behalf of private investors for more than a decade and says: “We are spotting some great bargains. Even if the market continues to struggle in the near term, buy and hold for five or ten years and you will almost certainly make a healthy profit.”

Now, if you study all that carefully you will see that, again, there is hardly any fact, but plenty of opinion.  On the one hand “some commentators are predicting a further 15% fall, whereas in some regions the “severe slide” has been 1.4% in one month……even multiplying that by 12 months, I can’t get it to make 15%. 

The average fall has been 0.1% which on a property of £200k means a drop of….ooooohhhh…..£200 on value.

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