Brickonomics

Odd ideas to kickstart house building No 93: Just give first-time buyers £10,000

What would happen if the taxpayer (via the Government) decided to give first-time buyers otherwise unable to raise a deposit £10,000 so they could buy a new home? The answer, at least on the face of it, is a bit...

Posted by Brian on July 26, 2009 9:36 AM

Why you might want to raise a glass to building homes?

As we rage about the cost to the taxpayer of 80p bath plugs and the construction of elaborate duck houses, here's a figure to contemplate. For every new home built in recessionary times, each taxpayer is about 10p to 15p...

Posted by Brian on June 5, 2009 9:45 AM

If 2008 was bad for the housing market, 2009 looks much worse

There are plenty of scary figures in the latest forecast from the Council of Mortgage Lenders not least the expectation that half a million homeowners will fall into arrears. The expectation that 75,000 homes will be repossessed by mortgage lenders...

Posted by Brian on December 18, 2008 5:52 PM

No Christmas present for estate agents or the economy in RICS figures

Two bits of good news for house sellers and builders in the latest housing market survey by the surveyors' body RICS. The graph showing the proportion of surveyors reporting prices falls appears to have bottomed out. And the graph showing...

Posted by Brian on December 9, 2008 9:44 AM

How to save 150,000 construction jobs, earn the Treasury £16 billion and create 200,000 new homes

Imagine that Chancellor Alistair Darling had decided to boost public spending by investing £20 billion of taxpayers' money over the next two years in buying land and building homes earmarked for eventual open market sale. What would be the net...

Posted by Brian on November 25, 2008 3:50 PM

The Chancellor's measures are not exceptional enough

I can but agree with the Chancellor that these are exceptional times and they require exceptional measures. My complaint, as I have said before, is that it took rather too long for the bulk of the political establishment to accept...

Posted by Brian on November 24, 2008 5:53 PM

Treasury faces £4.5 billion hole as house sales and stamp duty receipts slump

The steady decline in the UK housing market has been underlined by the latest numbers to come out of HM Revenue & Customs. They show sales of homes dropping to 72,000 in August, compared with 164,000 last August The figures...

Posted by Brian on September 24, 2008 1:30 PM

Official figures show construction output dropping in second quarter

So there it is, construction output slumped sharply in the second quarter of this year, according to the first take by the national statisticians of economic activity. The statisticians put the 0.7% drop in construction activity down to the sharp...

Posted by Brian on July 25, 2008 10:18 AM