Savills’ recent UK Housing Market Survey demonstrated that location is still the thing that has most effect on a property’s price. More than 80% of those interviewed put quality of neighbourhood (i.e. location) in first place.

Here is the running order:

1. Neighbourhood
2. External appearance
3. Good schools
4. Low maintenance
5. Safe environment
6. Large plot
7. Proximity to amenities
8. Garage
9. Garden / outside space
10. Quality of construction

Others, in order of importance, were: period character, size of rooms, décor, light airy rooms, internal layout, number of rooms, overall size, community, storage.

If you look at numbers 1, 3, 5, and 7, you see that four of the first seven are location-related.

No great surprises perhaps, but don’t assume that the same criteria don’t apply to properties you intend to let. These factors (with the possible exception of number 4) are just as important to your potential tenants as they would be to a potential purchaser.

I can’t make up my mind about this – is it a good thing or not? Research carried out for Alliance and Leicester Mortgages shows that 78% of brokers expect the market for 100% + mortgages with loans to increase over the next two years.

It’s good to see that finance is available for investing: perhaps to release some of the equity in your home to use as deposits on investment properties. But to borrow more than a property is worth, using that property as security, does smack of recklessness. Particularly if you are borrowing over a 25 year term to buy consumer goods which won’t last 25 years.

As long as the monthly interest, or repayments, or both are affordable, and the money is used to invest in appreciating assets rather than to buy liabilities, then perhaps it’s no bad thing. Call me old-fashioned, but I just worry when people take out long-term loans to buy fast-depreciating liabilities - like cars, for instance.

As a way of getting out of an existing debt problem, it might represent the lowest interest rate available, particularly when compared with some of the debt rescheduling advertisements you keep seeing.

My view remains - borrow to invest, never to consume.

Did you know that a single mum with two kids, living in the UK on benefits, is among the top one percent richest people on earth? Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are poorer. I’m not trying to make a cheap political point; we’re a wealthy, indulgent and mostly civilised society. But it does put things into perspective doesn’t it? I wonder what Ann Widdecombe would make of that?

Home Information Packs (HIPs) have finally arrived. Whilst some aspects of the introduction (though not the packs themselves) are pure farce, the greatest problem with HIPs is the way they have been sold (actually, mis-sold) to the public. Consider the following:

1. The legal documents are nothing new. If you offer a property for sale at auction, your legal pack is pretty much the same as what goes into a HIP.
2. The home condition report, intended as a sort of survey cum valuation is no longer required.
3. The home energy report is nothing at all to do with buying or selling a house or speeding up the process. It is simply an EU directive which the government are trying to slip in under the smokescreen of HIPs.

The HIP ‘problem’ arose because the government, wanting to be seen as modernising the process, didn’t have the nerve to admit that nothing was actually changing, though the price was going up. The Tories made themselves look stupid by raising all sorts of inane – and irrelevant - objections. At least the Lib Dems had the good sense to keep their gobs shut on this occasion – as far as I remember.

www.viceroyinvest.com

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