Savills have copied my workings.

From City AM:

House prices are expected to surge another £50,000 over the next five years, further reducing affordability in the UK property market, according to new forecasts published today. Estate agent Savills predicts house prices will jump nine per cent this year, driven by the extended stamp duty holiday and prospective buyers rushing to purchase larger homes with gardens...

This explanation is pretty feeble - the SDLT breaks are being phased out and more demand for large gardens means less demand for small or no gardens, so should cancel out.

They then let the cat out of the bag - it's just a credit bubble:

Lower interest rates, an increase in the supply of high loan-to-value mortgages as lenders return to riskier sections of the market and high levels of savings built up during the pandemic are expected to keep demand elevated, Savills said.

Which is exactly what I said here. Going by the previous two 18-year cycles, a further increase of £50,000 before it all *pops* again is on the lower side of expectations.

Nobody move or the estate agents get hurt!

From the BBC:

Some 77% of members asked by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said that the Brexit impasse was holding back activity.

New buyer enquiries, sales, and homes being put on the market all fell in February, the survey said.

This would mean a "challenging spring" for housing and the economy, it said.

Home-Owner-Ists 1: Economic reality 4.

From City AM:

New stamp duty rules are causing landlords to sell up in droves

An unforced own-goal right from the kick-off there. The extra 3% SDLT for non-owner occupiers might deter new landlords, but existing landlords are more likely to hang on to what they already own.

Last year the government introduced new rules meaning landlords could no longer claim relief on interest payments on their mortgages...

Another own goal in the third minute. They *can* claim relief, it will just be restricted to 20% (to be phased in over the next few years).

... at the time landlords warned it would put people off putting their homes up for rent, pushing up rental prices.

One apiece on the main point, everybody agreed it would force a few highly leveraged landlords to sell up; followed by a foul in the Homey's box and a penalty opportunity for Economic Reality.

Economic Reality's best striker is trotting up to the ball... the decider is, will more or fewer homes be up for rent and will rents go up or down?

Economic Reality says - when landlords sell up, it will be higher earning tenants who buy them, thus leaving a smaller pool of lower earning tenants, putting downward pressure on rents. This is quite the opposite of the Disappearing Homes Conundrum.

However, the figures also showed the supply of rental stock increased eight per cent in the year to March, from 169 properties per branch to 183. The figure was flat on February.

Back of the net! From the point of view of a BTL landlord, the interest acts like (privately collected) LVT so encourages them to make best use of what they own - get a tenant in or sell it; tax relief for interest ameliorates that, so reducing the value of the tax relief makes it a bit more like LVT again. An unexpected but welcome impact.

The number of tenants negotiating rent reductions also rose, with 3.6 per cent of agents saying they had witnessed tenants knocking down prices in March, compared with 2.2 per cent in February.

Some people are on the pitch. They think it's all over...

A quarter of agents said landlords had raised rents in March, down seven percentage points from March 2016.

It is now!

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (364)

We've heard this one a million times: "Ooh but what about the farmers, they'll all go bankrupt?". You can sort of forgive this when the man in the street says it, because he doesn't know that in the UK, 99% of the land value is the five or ten per cent of surface area which is urban/developed land, the three-quarters which is used for farming or forestry has such a negligible rental value (£5 - £50 an acre, net of subsidies) that it is barely worth taxing. What we ought to do first is get rid of the negative LVT i.e. farmland subsidies and then see how things pan out.

But here is an estate agent raising the eternal question "Is he deliberately lying or is he really stupid?":

Many commentators have advocated changing the current tax system which is linked to land and land ownership, to a new system similar to land value or wealth tax in other EU states. While the Scottish Government’s consultation highlights sustainability, it does not give enough consideration to the financial sustainability of our food production industry and how important that industry is in supporting our growing population.

The introduction of a Land Value Tax would require a revaluation of all property assets with some form of exemptions or banding. With most of our rural land involved in producing food we anticipate most of this tax burden will fall on farming families and be a further burden on the cost of food production.

None of that tax - or at most 1% of it - would fall on farmland. And a tax on rental values does not affect selling prices - it is selling prices which dictate the rental value, not the other way round. Price of wheat goes up, value of arable land goes up and vice versa.

The forestry sector would also be hampered as the land tax would be a major disincentive to planting schemes, when the Scottish Government is already 50% behind on their planting targets for commercial forestry.

Bollocks, it is the very lowest value land which is used for forestry i.e. steeper slopes, places in the middle of nowhere, places without much natural irrigation etc, which have a rental value of £5 per acre per year, tens of pennies per tree per year, with each tree increasing in value by 50p - £1 per year. Even with a tax of £5 per acre, forestry would still be profitable i.e. worth doing.

There is also a real risk that making structural changes to the way that land can be owned will lead to plummeting land values.

Withdrawing the farmland subsidies would do this, so what? And the LVT makes no difference to 'the way that land can be owned', in the same way as income tax doesn't affect your career choice much.

Given that much of the banking crisis was linked to the destabilisation of the commercial property world, politicians need to think carefully about the consequences of destabilising values within the agricultural sector.

No it wasn't. It was the bubble and subsequent bust in residential land prices which caused it. Surely he knows that? So keep prices low and you will not get any more busts. In any event, he is conflating farmland with commercial i.e. urban land.

Family farming businesses may find themselves unable to secure a working capital overdraft...

He must be aware that the price of UK farmland has trebled over the last ten years, were farmers not able to get working capital overdrafts until ten years ago? And why can't farmers do like other businesses and fund themselves out of retained profits? What about tenant farmers, what about new entrants?

... and any knock on effect on the financial sector would have widespread consequences for those far beyond the agricultural sector.

Nobody move or the puppy gets it.

"Get rich quick"

From today's City AM:

An interactive graphic released last month by sales agent JLL on their website predicts the parts of the route that are likely to see the biggest house price growth once the Shenfield to Reading line starts to kick in in 2020.

The agent has charted all 38 stations and installed a number of filters that predict where the most money can be made. Top performing areas include Whitechapel in east London, with Woolwich in the south east coming in at a close second.

'Nuff said.

I was surprised to see this in The Times

Emailed in by MBK.

The first bit is boilerplate Homey:

Labour’s proposal for a mansion tax, under which all properties above a market value of £2 million would be subject to a levy, is a third way in taxation...

The real purpose is political. This is not a tax on property so much as a tax on the southeast of England. Of the 95,000 homes in the UK that would qualify, 95 per cent of them are in London and the southeast. The whole of Britain north of, and including, Birmingham would pay little more than 2 per cent of the total.

This is taxation as pure political calculation.

*yawn*

But then he lets loose with this, it's hard to disagree:

Not that I wish to discredit the notion of an impost on property. On the contrary, the case for taxing property more heavily than we do in Britain is persuasive.

Unlike income, property is hard to hide and a levy upon it correspondingly difficult to evade. It would generate a lot of money from foreign owners who are contributing little to the exchequer. Revenues would usually rise with prosperity and if the volatility of the housing cycle were flattened a little by heavier taxation, then so much the better.

The case is intellectual as well as practical. The state takes £700 billion a year in taxation and that sum should ideally be collected according to a principle that is widely agreed to be fair. Income, which is directly earned, should be taxed lightly and a party by the name of Labour ought to be the most vocal proponents of low income tax.

The bonanza of house price inflation, though, is not income that I have genuinely earned. It is a reward that, in JS Mill’s arresting image, falls into my mouth as I sleep. There is a case for returning to the principle that informed Lloyd George’s “people’s budget” of 1909. This is an argument that, with enough time, can be joined and won.

Taxation in Britain has no such philosophical order... Only 5 per cent of the tax take comes from land and buildings.

The beauty of the green and pleasant land as a taxable asset is that it retains its value because there is a fixed supply of 60 million acres and the maker has stopped making it. The windfall gains from land are often the result of public infrastructure development, which should be taxed. A levy of 1 per cent on the land would yield £50 billion. Once the deficit had been cleared, income tax could be cut by a third or corporation tax abolished.

A truly radical Labour party would have been making this case for years... The place to begin in policy terms is not a crude, cliff-edge mansion tax but a revaluation of the council tax that is still, absurdly, calculated on 1991 prices.

As to the wailing about Mansion Tax or SDLT or LVT or anything else being "a tax on London", well that's because they are taxes on land values and land values are highest in London, or on various beaches along the south coast. You might as well say that income tax is a tax on London because people have the highest wages there.

Savill's did a breakdown this month; the total value of all UK housing is currently £5,750 billion (which includes a very low estimated market value for social housing units of £72,000 each).

Housing in greater London is one-quarter of the total, and the South East is another one-fifth, so between them, you'd expect about half of taxes on land and buildings to be raised from London and the South East.

Those two areas generate 'not enough' in Council Tax but 'too much' in SDLT (people in those areas also probably pay or generate 'too much' income tax but 'not enough' in VAT, to be honest). If you treat the £1 or £2 billion Mansion Tax as Council Tax Bands I to M it nudges their share to roughly 45% or a half, or whatever, so big deal.

It's nice to see the 1% = £50 billion calculation mentioned, I helped launch that one.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (335)

We're really running out of raw material for this series, but it's nice to see some good old KLN dredged up again by people who must know that the argument has been disproven by actual recent events, it is null and void on the facts:

Emailed in by MBK from The Telegraph:

A mansion tax could wipe almost £1bn off government revenues [and deter] wealthy investors from buying in London, according to new research from Savills.

The maths on the £1 bn fall in other revenues is shaky at best, so let's ignore that. Let's go with their assumption that the tax would increase the cost of buying in London.

Don't they know that the cost of buying in central London has been increasing at a double-digit compound rate for years if not decades? So each year, the cost of buying in London has gone up by ten per cent, but the foreigners keep piling in, it's a status thing. Maybe the Mansion Tax would add ten per cent to the cost of buying in London, why would that suddenly stop them?

Oh... the Homeys then admit that the Mansion Tax would not increase the cost of buying in London, because prices would fall accordingly:

"The imposition of mansion tax is likely to result in a reduction in the amount people are willing to pay for the assets on which it is charged," said Lucian Cook, head of residential research for Savills.

In summary, the tax would have no effect, or an effect which is so small as to be immeasurable either way. Mr Cook keeps digging:

Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour have rejected early plans to impose a 1pc levy on value in excess of £2m, and now back a banded proposal that mirrors the annual tax on enveloped dwellings (ATED)...

"If it were to be of the order of scale of ATED … [it] has the capacity to put a fairly sizeable spanner in the working of London's prime property market," said Mr Cook...

The Savills report recommended that the Government should scrap mansion tax and add more council tax bands.

The ATED is, in effect, like another four Council Tax bands, being an annual charge of between 0.4% and 0.7% of each home's current selling price. So in absolute terms, the tax is more than Council Tax, but in percentage terms it's less. And although it's calculated differently to the Mansion Tax, in absolute or relative terms it is much the same.

And what effect did the ATED have?

Precisely none, the government expected super-wealthy people to unpick their fancy offshore ownership ruses, but they didn't. They just happily paid the tax and revenues so far have been five times what the government expected. Maybe having a fancy offshore ownership structure and paying the ATED is like a status symbol to these people, like having your fancy Ferrari shipped over for the summer season?
-------------------------------------
And to round things off, Savills have completely contradicted their own earlier tried and tested KLN of last year:

Ed Miliband has reopened the mansion tax debate, but such a tax would be complex and inefficient, raising little revenue at great potential cost and could unintentionally hurt the asset rich, cash poor long term owners of high value property.

Ho hum.

In their world view, the only people who own homes in central London are either Poor Widows or wealthy foreigners.

These two groups are diametrically opposed in all respects; what's good for one is bad for the other; what applies to one does not apply to the other. So if Mansion tax is bad for one group, it is good for the other.

If we want more wealthy foreigners to buy homes in central London (good for balance of payments etc) then from whom should they buy their homes?

The answer must surely be from Poor Widows, if one wealthy foreigner buys from another, then that does not mean a cash inflow to the UK or more spending here.

The Mansion Tax won't discourage wealthy foreigners from buying, that's borne out by their own arguments and actual facts, but it might nudge the potential heirs of a few Poor Widows to encourage them to sell up.

Win win!

Yes, but it's my hard unearned money, bleat, wail...

From The Evening Standard:

Londoners are likely to bear the brunt of the bill as the Treasury rakes in a staggering £37 billion more in stamp duty and inheritance tax over the next five years, it emerged today.

OK, let's assume London landowners pay two-thirds of that, that's about £5 billion a year.

According to this article from February 2013: The total value of London homes currently sits at £1.12 trillion, which is bordering on 25% of the entire UK property worth.

London house prices have been rising by rather more than ten per cent a year compound for the last twenty years, and the usual suspects are gleefully forecasting that London house prices will continue to rise at this rate, that's £100 billion of wealth being transferred to London landowners each and every year for doing precisely nothing, £5 billion is five per cent of that.

Beats working.

Or to put that in perspective, one single London estate agency managed to collect nearly £1 billion in sales commissions last year. I'm all for bashing the UK government, but is it not fair to say that the UK has spent (i.e. taxpayers' money) rather more on London and people in it that the estate agents? Render unto Caesar and all that.

"Kingsmills massacre: Alan Black says estate agents involved"

From the BBC:

The lone survivor of an IRA massacre of ten Protestants believes estate agents may have been involved, a coroner's court has heard.

On Monday, a solicitor for Alan Black made the claim at the preliminary hearing of a new inquest into the Kingsmills shootings.

The attack took place near a property which came on to the market in the County Armagh village of Kingsmills in 1976.

The victims were all first time buyers who were shot dead when an IRA gang ambushed the mini-bus taking them for a viewing.

Dead Weight Cost of Estate Agency.

The just released ONS Labour Market Statistics  here, shows an increase of 15.9% in one year, in the number of people working in real estate activities. The total now standing at 562,000.

Tracking back further to 2001, it seems this figure is twice as high now as it was then. Property values have nearly doubled in this period. Coincidence?

How is it the the free market hasn't competed away the extra commission by the lowering of fees? It appears that estate agents must content with less turn over.

If we had a 100% LVT what would this do to the number of estate agents/property management companies?

Georgist Economist Criticises Knight Frank's Report On The Mansion Tax

Hot on the heels of high end estate agents Knight Frank's widely publicised report denigrating the Mansion Tax, economist Nic Tideman, writing for the Journal of Economic Literature, has launched a scathing riposte.

Titled  "Knight Frank's Proposal to End Distinctions Among Factors of Production and Their Objection to the Mansion Tax" , Tideman shows how the failure to recognise the conceptual difference between rent and interest, inexorably leads to the rejection that land rents are a just source of public revenue.

The abstract is as follows:

"Knight Frank claimed that there are no economically interesting distinctions among factors of production, and they also strongly opposed Vince Cable's proposal to implement a Mansion Tax.

We locate and examine the Mansion Tax in Knight’s framework of property rights and argue that Knight ignored an inefficiency in the original appropriation of land that occurs when competition is used to assign property rights in land. This inefficiency is visible only if land and capital are conceptually separated."

The full article can be read here.

"Whether that is directly linked to Help to Buy or rising confidence, it is too early to say."

Says Margaret Snook of Orbit, the country's largest Help to Buy agent, which operates in the West Midlands and East Anglia. "There doesn't seem to be a shortage of properties in most areas," she says. "In Birmingham, the Black Country, Coventry, there are big [development] sites."

This means that average property prices of £130,432 in Wolverhampton look set to rise, but Snook says it is not yet possible to judge whether Help to Buy is driving up prices. "Whether that is directly linked to Help to Buy or rising confidence, it is too early to say."

West Midlands: where Help to Buy is booming

Regeneration-led developments at former car factories contribute to success of scheme for acquiring newly-built homes.

Alongside the above piece the G is also currently running with:

Housing market: build, build, build

Editorial: The shortfall in new homes has led to bubbles, busts, a lopsided economy and misery for many unable to get on the ladder.

and

Help to Buy: a great way of distorting an already distorted housing market

Jonathan Portes and Angus Armstrong: The bulk of the new money is a subsidy for banks. It will prop up a flawed sector, raise house prices and fix no problems at all.

"Graffiti artist was secret estate agent"

From The Metro:

The public knew him as a £60,000-a-year graffiti artist – but he led a secret life as an estate agent, leaving purchasers many millions in debt.

Kristian Holmes led a secret life as one of Britain’s most prolific "debt vandals", planting his distinctive ‘For Sale’ sign in front of flats, houses and office blocks.

His firm, PS Estates, wore smart suits and used keys to get into homes and forced scores of buyers to make multiple viewings during a seven-year campaign across the south-east of England, a court heard.

Holmes, 32, used an A to Z street guide to mark all the locations he had appointments booked. It helped him evade police for six years.

When he was rumbled in 2009, and released under police caution, the father of two posted videos on YouTube showing a mixed race man putting up a 'For Sale' sign – it derailed the investigation for another year, a court heard.

Holmes, of Sidcup, Kent, was jailed for three-and-a-half years after being convicted of 39 incidents of hoodwinking buyers into taking out unaffordable mortgages and perverting the course of justice.

Sentencing him at Blackfriars crown court in London, Judge Deva Pillay said: "These sales were so prolific they could justly be described as occurring on an industrial scale."

Holmes’s crime spree started in 2003, when he sold a home near the Bluebell Railway in Uckfield, East Sussex, and his 'For Sale' boards were even found in Ibiza.

Prosecutor James Murray-Smith said: "We’re not talking about helping people make sensible investments, but tricking them into running up huge debts which the majority of the public see as tedious and depressing.’

"Paramedics called to the semi-detatched property were unable to help the young family"

The Daily Mail lets itself down a bit in this crime report:

Paramedics called to the semi-detatched property were unable to help the young family and immediately called in the police at 6.40pm yesterday... A neighbour, who asked not to be named, said that a couple lived in the semi-detatched property with the two girls....

We're told that they lived in Ruislip, West London, but nowhere in the article do they mention what the house is worth, although the photos show that it is pebble-dashed, so applying Richard Allan's logic, the cause of death was probably Hydrogen Sulfide. Even more bizarrely, they mis-spell "semi-detached".

Meanwhile, on Planet Home-Owner-Ist...

From today's Evening Standard Letters page:

If Miliband has any sense, there is no way he will actually implement a mansion tax that would alienate an important element of middle-class Labour support. In the London property market, the likely £2 million threshold is hardly a fortune(1): perhaps buying a two-bedroom flat in a leafy, but not super-prime, inner London area,(2) and there are plenty of properties in this bracket that were bought for relatively little years ago.(3)

A mansion tax would have a profound effect on the dynamics of the market: a lot of people would sell up(4) and court cases would be certain as others try to revalue their property.(5) Foreign investors(6) have already been hit by the Coalition’s clumsy levy of 15 per cent stamp duty in the last Budget,(6) and a mansion tax would only magnify their problems; why are we trying so hard to repel them?(7) A far more plausible, consumer-friendly approach is to bring in a range of higher council tax bands above Band G.(8)

Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates.(9)

Who or what is "an important element of middle-class Labour support" Does he mean multi-mansion owning Tony Blair? If I were Cameron and Clegg, I'd introduce Mansion Tax (or even better Land Value Tax) just to spite Tony Blair and Chris Huhne.

1) Do these people not listen to themselves sometimes? Do they not think about how their outpourings of Homey bile "resonate" with the ordinary sort of reader? According to the Homeys, £2 million... is hardly a fortune"?? That sounds like a life-changing sum of money to me and probably to most people reading this.

2) That's an outright lie. Even in the most expensive part of super-prime London, i.e. Mayfair, there are plenty of two-bedroom flats available for rather less than £2 million.

3) Poor Widow Bogey. He does not specify how many is "plenty" or what "relatively little" is or how many "years ago", but so what? It might be true that there are a few thousand current owners of £2m-plus homes who bought them thirty or forty years ago for £10,000 or £100,000 or whatever. They've massive windfall gains on which they have not paid a single penny in tax. They didn't even pay off the original mortgage out of "taxed income", they paid off half of it out of the rent they were saving by owning not renting and inflation paid off the other half.

4) Great - and others would buy. The people who spend £2 million on a two-bedroom flat are not the sort of people to be bothered by a few thousand quid a year "Mansion Tax", it comes off the price anyway.

5) Fine, let them go to Court (strictly speaking, a Tribunal but this man knows shit about fuck, he doesn't do "facts") and argue that their home is only worth £1.5 million. Maybe it is only worth £1.5 million, in which case we introduce a mini-Mansion Tax for homes worth between £1 million and £2 million.

6) Nobody invests in land values. They are just there.

6) Agreed, SDLT is a tax on transactions and a very bad tax. The 4%, 5% and 15% rates are shameful. Now, notwithstanding that the SDLT paid probably "came off the price", as a gesture of goodwill there's nothing to stop the government giving people credit for any SDLT paid; if you paid 5% SDLT, you are exempted from Mansion Tax for the first five years from the time you bought it; if you paid 15%, you are exempt for the first fifteen years (or whatever).

7) A Mansion Tax would attract rich foreigners to London; for every whining Poor Widow who moves out, a wealthy oligarch or kleptocrat and his or her partner and family move in. They aren't keen to pay £2 million for a flat; they are keen to live in London; the Mansion Tax would be small change to them and selling prices would fall accordingly anyway (it acts like a higher interest rate). Subsequent purchasers would not give a toss. And every £1 that these people spend in the UK reduces our woeful trade deficit by £1. What's not to like?

8) This is how stupid the man is. The highest Council Tax band is H, not G (in Wales, they go up to I).

9) To cap it all, the man works for a firm of estate agents. If they knew what was good for them, they'd be rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of a Mansion Tax.

Wonders never cease!

From Greater Philadelphia Association of Realtors' webpage "What is GPAR?":

The Association has always been an advocate of private property owners, as well as an ardent crusader against government spending and unnecessary real estate tax increases... In April 2000, GPAR succeeded in its legislative attempts promoting the constitutional right to hang “SOLD” signs in Philadelphia. That same year, ten-year real estate tax abatements for new residential construction, home improvements and commercial, industrial and deteriorated properties were reached legislatively.

So far so bad...

The Association has recently supported legislation written by the Philadelphia City Controller's Office examining the implementation of a Land Value Tax. It is strongly believed that this form of taxation can eliminate onerous taxes such as the wage tax, real estate tax, business privilege taxes, etc.

As of April 11, 2002, GPAR was instrumental in a major campaign to lower the city wage tax and successfully lobbied Philadelphia City Council resulting in a 16-0 unanimous decision to pass the legislation.

Wot?

Spotted by Stuart King at HPC.

"Predicting property booms from station to station"

Richard Allan left a link to the summary of an excellent bit of research by the LSE.

Whether they really have developed a model which predict the increase in location values around new stations as accurately as they claim, I do not know, but the relationship is easily observable and easily explained, and it's reassuring to know that it's not just estate agents and land value taxers who are aware of it.

Why does the Daily Mail employ estate agents to write its crime reports?

Spotted by Kj, article here:

Father, 31, charged with murder of gifted PhD student girlfriend, 28, at their £250,000 Georgian home in Bath.

...Keene - who lives just yards from a row of renowned multimillion-pound apartments - was remanded in custody to appear before Bristol Crown Court on July 10. Police were called to a disturbance at the couple's home just after midnight on Sunday. They discovered Ms Miron-Buchacra's body at the attractive terraced property, which is split into five flats worth around £250,000 each...

The address is two doors down from the former home of Admiral Phillip, the first governor of Australia, who lived there between 1806 and 1814. It lies opposite The Assembly Rooms, a magnificent 18th century building, which is now used as a museum and exclusive wedding venue. The Circus, a world famous John Wood development and one of the UK’s most prestigious addresses, also lies just 150 yards away...

Local business owner David Price was shocked such a terrible incident could happen in one of the most affluent parts of the picturesque city...

It's a shame they didn't mention whether Ms Miron-Buchacra's body was found next to the marble fireplace or the fitted Indesit double-fridge and/or whether her blood had stained the cream fitted carpet in the drawing room or could be easily mopped up from the granite-look tiles in the kitchen, but hey.

"Estate agents posed as burglars to sell flats"

From The Evening Standard:These are the scruffily dressed estate agents being hunted by police after selling £180,000 worth of apartments in south London. The two men, caught on CCTV, are thought to have gained entry to the apartment buildings by pretending to be burglars before attempting to sell three homes.

Victims of two makeovers at the Viridian Apartments in Battersea Park Road on February 1 returned to find their flats nicely tidied up with bunches of twigs in vases.

Zane Lawrence, whose £750,000 property was put on the market, today told how his fiancée felt "violated". He said: “They must have buzzed everyone at the flats until someone let them in. They were dressed really scruffily and probably just said to someone that they intended a quick smash and grab on the ground floor. When I got here the doors had quite clearly been given a good clean.

"These guys don’t look like estate agents, we want to raise awareness in case they do come through somebody's back window again. It feels like our personal space has been invaded. My fiancée is upset because this has never happened to her before, she feels quite violated because of it."

Richard Street and Sandra Burrows had thousands of pounds of jewellery, clothes and electronics valued in the same raid. They claim a third potential sale at a nearby apartment a month later could have been prevented if officers had released images of the suspects sooner. The same men were captured on CCTV on March 9 entering the Howard Building in Queenstown Road where they put up a 'For sale' sign before being scared off.

Miss Burrows, 32, who works for a private equity firm, said: "The police followed the process and did all the things they needed to do but it was too slow. While they were doing this someone else's flat was put on the market."

Police have now released the CCTV images of the men. Anyone with information should call the Wandsworth Property Crime Unit on 020 8247 8046 or Crimewatch anonymously on 0800 555 1111.

They (want to) own land! Give them money!

From Estate Agent Today:*

Countrywide, the UK’s largest estate agent, has called on the Government to act now to boost the property market, saying that the current low level of house sales is ‘unsustainable’. The NAEA has also made representations to Chancellor George Osborne, asking for there to be no further property taxes but for Stamp Duty to be reformed.

Countrywide is calling on Osborne to introduce mortgage relief for first-time buyers, set tough mortgage lending targets for banks, provide tax breaks for the private rented sector, and introduce incentives for development projects.

Grenville Turner, group chief executive of Countrywide, said: “A recovery of the housing market is fundamental to economic recovery. Current transaction volumes are simply not sustainable. Based on current levels of activity, the average home owner moves house once every 25 years as opposed to [the historic norm of] once in every 12 years. This has wider implications for society, the labour market and the UK economy. The valuable economic contribution that the property market makes is being overlooked and there is a risk that current Government policy will be ineffective or, even worse, cause unnecessary volatility."

That's about as ass-backwards as you can get.

Quite clearly, estate agents like it when there are lots of purchases and sales, so if they want more people to move home, they ought to be calling for lower taxes on earned incomes, higher taxes on land and buildings and an end to subsidies of this nature, such as Support for Mortgage Interest, which enables people to hang on to a home they wouldn't be able to otherwise afford, thus preventing somebody who can afford it from buying it and not nudging the SMI claimants into buying somewhere cheaper.

As it happens, they are correct to claim that people moving home is important to the economic recovery, because by and large, people will move to where they can earn the most, even if they (as estate agents) are merely saying this out of naked self-interest.

The three specific measures they propose will all merely have the effect of pushing up the price of land and will not affect transaction volumes one iota - and tax breaks for the private rented sector will probably reduce the number of transactions (but boost income of letting agents).

We know from Nationwide's own chart that when MIRAS was phased out last time, the net amount which first-time buyers were prepared to pay remained unchanged - it was the people selling up who lost the benefit of the subsidy (and the income taxpayer in general who gained, because one man's tax break is another man's tax burden):* Via SBC at HPC.

UPDATE; Bob E has read to the end of the article and alerts us to this bit: "Among its other suggestions are a cap of 25% affordable housing units per development, to help builders achieve viability and produce more marketable schemes."

Righty-ho, make housing more affordable by pushing up the price and having less "affordable" housing.