Owning your own home

Congratulations. You are one of the only people who will benefit from this gimmick.

Tax cuts from the tories? Further inflated house prices? Who'd have thought?

This was a good read: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2017/nov/18/house-prices-land-prices-cheaper-homes

In the Netherlands, the only sizeable country in Europe more densely populated than England, the Expropriation Act allows local authorities to buy land at current-use value. They prepare it for development, use part for social housing and sell the rest for commercial use, often at a large profit.

Think of it. Councils take all the financial uplift from planning permission, using potentially huge profits from land sales to build social housing almost at no cost to the public purse. Developers focus on making profits from building high-quality homes, not from hoarding plots. Land speculation is killed off almost overnight.

Instead, the chancellor will tell us in this week’s budget that the solution is billions more for help to buy. All that does is raise property prices and landowner profits. If only Philip Hammond could be more like Churchill.

So is this no stamp to duty for FTBs from today then, not from April 2018? Thought I read April somewhere. I'm hoping it'll cause a bit more interest interest in the flat in trying to sell.

Feel your pain. I'm in the same situation, though bought a year later. Still, look on the bright side.... At least £30k saved compared to renting over that time period.

00:01 - 22/11

So anyone who paid pre budget announcement this morning should get a rebate.
England and Ireland going forward, Wales until April (at least. Welsh parliament need to agree scheme going forward) and Scotland already have their own scheme so not included.

He's not really on here now, want me to give him a nudge?

The Dutch Expropriation Act sounds similar to the UK's Compulsory Purchase Act, which allows councils to do exactly the same. Not entirely sure why they don't, but I'd agree that they don't.

And the USA's emininent domain legislation.

#iwatchtoomuchsuits

Random question... how many sq ft per person do you have where you live and how does that compare to your parents.

Ffuuuuccckkkkkk

Can I add a fourth use of the expletive ‘fuck’ on this page?

Yes, yes I can.

your dad is Rod fucking Stewart aicmfp.

Councils are not empowered (and don't currently have the expertise) to develop land. Instead, they have to scape some of the profit from private developments in the form of S106, or CIL... although this can be lessened with accountancy tricks. Remember that the proceeds from 'Right to buy' are not allowed to go into more housing... genius.

Some leaders of local councils have awkward ties to developers. Or developers can always go above the head of the local council and involve the government, or mayor of London.

We have a broken system. CPOs are only really used in the UK to ensure infrastructure projects can go ahead and to re-appropriate empty homes (although they're usually sold to a developer to make them habitable again).

Random question... how many sq ft per person do you have where you live and how does that compare to your parents.

According to the EPCs
1100 pp for us
700 pp for my parents and probably about 2000 pp for mrs hammers parents (no EPC)
None of these in London's famous London. In Hackney we had 475 each.

Councils are not empowered (and don't currently have the expertise) to develop land

I'd suspect they will never get that expertise back - they're now dependant on consultancy for most of the things the Borough Architects and their associated offices used to do. The skills aren't there.

scrape some of the profit from private developments in the form of S106, or CIL... although this can be lessened with accountancy tricks

There are of course people who make quite a good living arguing down s106 contributions, affordable housing elements, etc. They're well worth their fee, if you're a developer. The public sector no longer has the cash or appetite to argue with them.

Some leaders of local councils have awkward ties to developers. Or developers can always go above the head of the local council and involve the government, or mayor of London.

You see lots of former councillors who start hawking themselves round offering 'services' to property firms. Professionally they are generally as clueless as you might expect but are sometimes useful for getting the current planning committee on side. The biggest problem of all of course is that no council these days has the taste to fight a potentially expensive appeal.

If the above sounds a bit depressing then, well, it is. Very easy to be nostalgic about some of the things achieved 50 or so years back.

We used to have this in the U.K. until the early 60’s. I forget what it was called but basically the estimated rental income from any property that you owned and lived in was added to your income for tax purposes.

It makes a lot of sense if you think about it - you get taxed on any other form of asset income (dividends, interest, etc), so why should housing get a special exemption?

Well there's only two of us at the moment but yeah. The in-laws house is a commuter-belt sprawling thing with garage conversions/etc.

It doesn’t - you just pay it up front rather than at the end when you dispose of it

I suspect this is because they want people to improve the housing stock and by not taxing at sale they incentivise improvement.

I don't really need it but yeah fuck it why not. It was supposed to be a loan.

2-bed places still on the up, seems like that’s what everyone wants and it’s a sellers market, especially Warners

Got the keys to the new place this afternoon. Had a good look round before it got dark and two things struck me - it looks massive with no furniture in and there's an awful lot that needs doing. There are dozens of light switches - fortunately most of them do something - and lots of pipes - that might not do anything at all. Lots of opportunities for the kids to do themselves some damage like missing railings on the stairs and small changes in level in most of the rooms that'll take a while to get used to. There's also a fair bit of junk that the previous owners have left for us to clear out too. First jobs are to change the locks, give everything a good clean, insulate the attic and paint the boys' bedroom.

I’m not sure I understand your point. The comparison I’m making is to some kind of yielding investment where you pay tax on the annual dividends, interest and so on.

Whether primary residences should be exempt from capital gains is a whole other can of worms! I think there is a justification given that people are usually recycling the proceeds of a house sale into another house - paying CGT would really fuck you up in that case.

Plus stamp is clearly independent of length of hold period or change in value. So it penalises those that need to move frequently etc ec

Is changing the locks a thing? We didn't :/ I just assume that the writing in blood on the wall we keep washing off is from the ghost.

There are some current attempts to revive council-employed architects although it's small-scale and in the context of cash-strapped planning depts not really sure whether it will come to anything. Croydon as ever are forging into a brave new era of council-led development and design. (I'm not sure myself how tongue-in-cheek I'm being. Partly, I guess.)

Councils are not empowered (and don't currently have the expertise) to develop land. Instead, they have to scape some of the profit from private developments in the form of S106, or CIL...

Councils and other Registered Social Landlords [Housing Associations] can and do develop land for social housing in conjunction with private contractors.

The problem is that building land is worth too much to private developers so they can rarely make the maths work.

If local need can be proved, social housing can be built outside normal planning rules, for example on green belt land. This is working OK in certain parts of the countryside, where there is a lot of land which can be worth 10x or 20x more as social housing land than for agriculture, but not in cities and we mainly need houses in cities.