Digging Deeper – Help to Buy: Equity Loan
Housing Market Charts
I’ve pulled together a collection of my charts on the UK housing market. They will be updated every month, probably with some new additions and commentary. But for the moment it’s just the charts! – Neal
Digging Deeper – ONS Regulated Mortgage Survey
Digging Deeper – Mortgage Repayments
As mortgage rates rise, attention is inevitably focussed on what impact they will have on borrowers’ mortgage repayment affordability. However, there is a lack of public data on borrowers’ actual repayments and many of the available data sources are constrained by the assumptions contained within. This note provides a quick summary on some of these sources and suggests that repayment affordability is better than some of them show.
Digging Deeper – FCA Mortgage Product Sales Data
Digging Deeper – UK 2020-Based Interim Population Projections
Increase of 167,000 People Per Year Over The Next Twenty Years
Much Lower Projected Growth Than Previous 2018-Based Projections
Higher Net Migration Not Enough To Offset Negative Natural Change
4.5 Million More People Aged 60+ by 2040
Continue reading “Digging Deeper – UK 2020-Based Interim Population Projections”Digging Deeper – The Death of the Buy-to-Let Mortgage
Booms, Busts, and Tax Changes
Not Dead Yet
More Data Please
The buy-to-let (BTL) mortgage was a key feature of the UK’s housing market in the late 1990s and 2000s. But the last few years have been much tougher for BTL investors and their lenders. There are regular reports suggesting large numbers of landlords are ready to sell up thanks to tighter taxation and tougher regulations. If these reports are true, this would suggest the death of the BTL mortgage. However, while the heady days of the 2000s are long gone, the BTL mortgage still plays a key part in today’s housing market. Unfortunately, our understanding of the exact role of the buy-to-let mortgage in the housing market is compromised by a lack of publicly available data.
Continue reading “Digging Deeper – The Death of the Buy-to-Let Mortgage”Digging Deeper – The Problem With The New-Build Premium
The new-build market has a mortgage problem. Mortgage lenders are less willing to lend at high loan-to-value ratios on new-build homes than existing ones. They have concerns over the pricing of new-build and how well the price of a new home will hold relative to the market over time. Our analysis looks to investigate whether these concerns are appropriate, the role of the Help to Buy equity loan scheme in bridging the gap between lenders’ concerns and market demand, and what might happen to the new-build market when Help to Buy ends.
Digging Deeper – Unbuilt Planning Permissions
Calculations suggesting there are over one million unbuilt planning permissions are too simplistic and don’t accurately reflect the realities of planning and housebuilding. Regular analysis comparing the number of new planning permissions and housebuilding completions suggests there are over one million homes with permission but unbuilt in England. The latest analysis is by the Local Government Association (LGA) and suggests that “More than 1.1 million homes granted planning permission in England in the last decade are yet to be built”. This is regularly cited as evidence of developer land banking and that the planning system is not a barrier to housebuilding. Unfortunately, the result is probably too high due to poor data and an overly simplistic calculation.
