Maidenhead First Time Buyers borrow £45.9m in the last 12 months

Starting with the bigger picture, over the last 12 months in the UK, 1,061,557 properties were sold with a total value of £223.74 bn. To give that some context, ten years ago 1,581,727 properties sold with a total value of £405.56bn, so it can be seen the number of people moving house has dropped by over a third over the last decade.

Whether you are a landlord, homeowner or tenant, it’s always important to keep an eye on the Maidenhead property market, not just from your point of view, but also from every player’s point of view. Over the last 12 months, 956 properties have sold (and completed) in Maidenhead, worth £503.1m. Interestingly the number of properties changing hands in Maidenhead has also dropped when compared to a decade ago.

It might surprise you that first time buyers in 2017 will benefit from a slight decline in Maidenhead buy-to-let investors.

Those looking to buy a home in the spring and summer of 2017 will face a far less competitive Maidenhead property market than the same time of year in 2016, when the urgency to beat the buy-to-let stamp duty hike was in full swing.  

Many landlords brought forward their purchases to beat the tax, and since then, the number of buy-to-let purchases has dropped slightly. First time buyers have taken advantage of that and have increased their buying. In fact, looking at the Bank of England figures, this is what UK lenders have lent on buy-to-let properties versus first time buyers over the last 12 months  …

Q1 2016 - £1bn buy-to-let mortgages vs £1.31bn for first time buyers

Q2 2016 - £1.35bn buy-to-let mortgages vs £1.08bn for first time buyers

Q3 2016 - £760m buy-to-let mortgages vs £1.28bn for first time buyers

Q4 2016 - £827m buy-to-let mortgages vs £1.42bn for first time buyers

When looking at the figures for Maidenhead itself, first time buyers have borrowed more than £45.9m in the last 12 months to buy their first home. This is a ringing endorsement of their confidence in their jobs and the local Maidenhead economy. Those 20 and 30 something’s who are considering being first time buyers in 2017 will find that the number of properties on the market has never been as good as it has for quite a while, meaning you have more choice of properties and less competition from so many buy-to-let landlords than a year ago.

Rightmove announced nationally that new seller enquiries are 26% up on the same time last year giving the stoutest indication that we may see a slight ease in the lack of properties on the market. When I look at Maidenhead, at this moment in time there are 691 properties for sale, compared to 423 properties a year ago. All this will be welcome news amongst Maidenhead first-time buyers with a combination of a proportional reduction in new investors and landlords.

2017 is proving an interesting year for all homeowners, be they buy-to-let landlords, existing homeowners or future homeowners.  For more thoughts on the Maidenhead property market like this, you might want to visit the Maidenhead Property Market Property Blog

£54m a year black hole in the Maidenhead Property Market - Is Buy to Let Immoral? (Part 2)

An Englishman’s Home is His Castle as Maggie Thatcher lauded - everyone should own their own home. In 1971, around 50% of people owned their own home and, as the baby-boomers got better jobs and pay, that proportion of homeowners rose to 69% by 2001. Homeownership was here to stay as many baby boomers assumed it’s very much a cultural thing here in Britain to own your own home.

But on the back of TV programmes like Homes Under the Hammer, these same baby boomers started to jump on the band wagon of Maidenhead buy to let properties as an investment. Maidenhead first time buyers were in competition with Maidenhead landlords to buy these smaller starter homes … pushing house prices up in the 2000’s (as mentioned in Part One) beyond the reach of first time buyers. Alas, it is not as simple as that. Many factors come into play, such as economics, the banks and government policy. But are Maidenhead landlords fanning the flames of the Maidenhead housing crisis bonfire?

I believe that the landlords of the 3,652 Maidenhead rental properties are not exploitive and are in fact, making many positive contributions to Maidenhead and the people of Maidenhead. Like I have said before, Maidenhead (and the rest of the UK) isn’t building enough properties to keep up the demand; with high birth rate, job mobility, growing population and longer life expectancy.

According to the Barker Review, for the UK to standstill and meet current demand, the country needs to be building 8.7 new households each and every year for every 1,000 households already built. Nationally, we are currently running at 5.07 per thousand and in the early part of this decade were running at 4.1 to 4.3 per thousand.

It doesn’t sound a lot of difference, so let us look at what this means for Maidenhead …

For Maidenhead to meet its obligation on the building of new homes, Maidenhead would need to build 221 households each year. Yet, we are missing that figure by around 92 households a year.

For the Government to buy the land and build those additional 92 households, it would need to spend £54,422,749 a year in Maidenhead alone. Add up all the additional households required over the whole of the UK and the Government would need to spend £23.31bn each year … the Country hasn’t got that sort of money!

With these problems, it is the property developers who are buying the old run-down houses and office blocks which are deemed uninhabitable by the local authority, and turning them into new attractive homes to either be rented privately to Maidenhead families or Maidenhead people who need council housing because the local authority hasn’t got enough properties to go around.

The bottom line is that, as the population grows, there aren’t enough properties being built for everyone to have a roof over their head. Rogue landlords need to be put out of business, whilst tenants should expect a more regulated rental market, with greater security for tenants, where they can rely on good landlords providing them high standards from their safe and modernised home. As in Europe, where most people rent rather than buy, it doesn’t matter who owns the house – all people want is a clean, decent roof over their head at a reasonable rent. 

So only you, the reader, can decide if buy to let is immoral, but first let me ask this question - if the private buy to let landlords had not taken up the slack and provided a roof over these people’s heads over the last decade .. where would these tenants be living now? ….. because the alternative doesn’t even bear thinking about!