From the weekend FT:
Grant Shapps, shadow housing minister, said it was time for the government to take measures to help consumers buy homes ... The most urgent need was to scrap stamp duty for most first-time buyers purchasing homes worth less than £250,000, Mr Shapps said in an interview with the FT...
F***ing hellski, it's almost as if they've been taking advice from Krusty Allsop ... oh ... they have!
As Fred Makepeace explains in the comments to that last link "...if you scrap stamp duty it will simply lead to an increase in the price of housing. Therefore the first time buyer is no better off and our Government loses an income stream. It's very basic economics surely!!!". Secondly, as spiteful as Stamp Duty (more correctly, 'Stamp Duty Land Tax') is, it is only 1% up to £250,000, so with prices falling at nearly 1% a month, is that problem not sort of ... er ... dealt with? Finally, mucking about with SDLT will do bugger all help to those poor mugs who have overstretched themselves and are looking at unaffordable interest-rate hikes.
Ministers could also help the market by scrapping home information packs and by removing the density targets that made housebuilders produce flats instead of family homes, he said.
Sure, HIPs are a load of rubbish, but it's only a few hundred quid wasted, they cost a fraction of what the vendor has to pay the estate agent. We shouldn't have 'density targets' anyway, if you leave it to the markets (rather than politicians, Greenies and NIMBYs), we'd probably get the right number of the right-sized homes being built in the right places. So half-marks for that last bit.
Similar measures were demanded several weeks ago by the Home Builders Federation as it warned that many of the industry’s 300,000 jobs were at risk from the freeze in the market.
Dear Homebuilders! Wake up and smell the coffee! If you can't shift your homes, then drop the prices! If you wrote down your land-banks to market value, then you would notice that you could still build and sell houses at a profit!
It appears the homebuilders have got their heads firmly stuck in the sand. Instead of dropping headline prices, they are coming up with all sorts of gimmicks - the latest being an interest-free loan for a quarter of the price, as perpetrated by Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon.
So What Will Be Done About The Officer?
38 minutes ago
2 comments:
t appears the homebuilders have got their heads firmly stuck in the sand.
Sorry, I think you have this wrong. House builders know all about the corrupt planning system. They have land banks that have the required permission, so they will wait until this 'attribute' realises maximum returns.
However ~ if we liberalise the planning market, this 'value' disappears overnight, thus they will build, otherwise someone will just buy another bit of land and beat them to it.
Sure, liberalising planning laws is, in and of itself, A Good Thing, but what happens if these homebuilders have snapped up all the best sites? They'd still be forcing people to live in less suitable places.
Secondly, the homebuilders are running out of time - there is such a thing as banking covenants. Of course their landbank will be worth many times as much in ten or twenty years' time, right now, it's worth sweet FA.
Thirdly, if you want to speed up development and prevent 'land-hoarders' from making windfall gains, that's a job for Land Value Tax-man!
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