House prices stabilise.

The decline in house prices slowed to a crawl at the start of the year, but a significant correction in the

average home price is still expected as borrowing costs mount.

The typical UK property now costs £281,684, down by £29 from £281,713 last month, according to figures published by Halifax, Britain's biggest mortgage lender. It follows more significant falls of 1.3 per cent in December and 2.4 per cent in November.

Households are facing record falls in living standards owing to the cost of living crisis, repeated interest rate rises and a slowdown in the global economy.

The average home price is now about £12,500, or 4.2 per cent, cheaper than it was at its peak in August last year, but it remains about £5,000 higher than the average January 2022.

Mortgage rates have jumped over the past year in line with the base rate of interest, which has risen from a historic low of 0.1 per cent in December 2021 to its present level of 4 per cent.

Lower house prices and the potential for interest rates to peak below the level anticipated last year should improve home buying affordability over time."

Tom Bill, head of UK residential research at Knight Frank, the property consultancy, said the start of 2023 provides a better guide for house prices than the declines recorded at the end of last year.

"The poor performance of the UK housing market in the chaotic final months of last year is not a useful barometer for 2023," he said.

www.sba.tax

Comments

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

Transport department officials have begun work on «Project Silverlight» suggesting the highspeed rail scheme might face four additional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces further delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by ministers to rein in its ballooning costs. The extra delays to the country’s biggest infrastructure project would mean that it would not be completed until as late as 2045 — 12 years after originally planned. «This is a function of inflation; we are having to find huge savings because the cost of everything the department is already doing will have become so much more expensive by then,» said one government official. In October, the FT reported that the Treasury had asked HS2’s management team to identify potential cuts or «scope reductions» to the high-speed line. Transport department officials have subsequently begun work on Project Silverlight aimed at fi...

Google has launched its Bard chatbot.

Google has launched its Bard chatbot in a move to rival OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to commercialise generative artificial intelligence technology. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to textbased questions, will be run separately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, generative AI has also been integrated into widely used productivity applications, such as Google’s Workspace including Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 software, as well as into popular apps such as Duolingo, allowing millions of people to start interacting with the technology. «We want to get feedback and gradually phase up the number of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-president of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI technology known a...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...

Search This Blog