Sheffield Property Blog by Sheffield Residential Estate and Lettings Agents Maz Iqbal

Even though the new legislation was placed on hold because of the recent General Election, it is expected the Government will start fining around half of all UK local authorities for failing to build enough new homes as Westminster starts to force local authorities to build more homes with the new laws.

The Conservative Government has gone on record with an ambition to build 300,000 new homes each year from the mid-2020s (aspiring as the average for the last 13 years has only been 177,000 pa).

So Downing Street see the planning system as requiring root and branch change to ensure local authorities deliver on that promise.  The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s ‘Housing Delivery Test’, which should be launched on an undetermined date this year, will hold local authorities to account for ensuring they hit their own specific house building targets.

If a local authority is unable to show that it has a five-year stock of land for building new homes, it gives builders greater rights and liberties to build their new homes where the builder wants (not where the local authority wants).

This will mean there will be a house building free-for-all

as the council will have less control over the setting, types of properties, contribution to infrastructure and location of any new home development.

Only 44% of local authorities have a local plan that is less than five years old.

Locally, Sheffield isn’t in that 44% of local authorities. The current situation is, a draft Local Plan is in preparation.

Yet, the original question of this article was to find out if we are building enough homes in Sheffield and the surrounding local authority area i.e. should we get the builders in? Well, the Government set targets for local authorities for the number of homes they should build each year. The latest set of data is for 2018, so for the three years up to and including 2018 i.e. 2016/2017/2018,

Sheffield’s new home building target was 5,565 new homes, yet it achieved 6,140, a surplus of 575 new homes

So, what does that all mean for the Sheffield property market?....

Read the full article at The Sheffield Property Blog

https://wp.me/p7Mruo-2sb

If you are buying a home in England costing more than £125,000, you will have to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax on the purchase of your new home. It is an important factor when moving, when you consider that Last year the average UK house buyer paid £10,150 in Stamp Duty Tax alone

Now as soon as the date for Rishi Sunak’s budget was set for 11th March 2020, conjecture in the Press began about what stamp duty changes he may disclose on budget day. The Chancellor only sets the budget for England and Northern Ireland, yet this is just as relevant for Wales and Scotland. Even though Derek Mackay, the Scottish Finance Secretary said on 6th February he has no plans to change Scotland’s version of Stamp Duty (LBTT), more often than not, Stamp Duty rule changes in England are often adopted in Wales and Scotland at a future date.

Some are asking if Sunak will impose what was promised in the Conservative manifesto with the 3% additional Stamp Duty surcharge on non-UK resident buyers? I have certainly heard in the Estate Agent community that foreign buyers are trying to rush through their sales in central prime London (Park Lane/Mayfair etc etc) before 11th March to ensure they don’t get hit with a new tax. Or will he go even further, and will we see a reappearance of Boris Johnson’s hitherto specified aim of eliminating Stamp Duty below £500k, consequently theoretically saving homebuyers many thousands of pounds?

However, opinions are divided on what, if anything, will be included in the budget.

Most believe that the extra 3% for foreign nationals is an almost certainty, and if it isn’t implemented straight away, it will be in the Autumn Statement. Many believe the Chancellor could also decide to repay the favour to those in the North who turned the Election map ‘blue’ on the evening of 12th December with actions to enhance the housing market north of the M62 with stamp duty changes. The best way he could do that is to raise the threshold from the current £125k.

When Boris ran for Tory leadership back in May 2019, he said that he wanted to expand the threshold at which you begin paying stamp duty from £125k to £500k, which when you consider 7 out of 8 residential sales in 2019 were for homes below £500k, that would have a considerable effect. If the Stamp Duty threshold had been raised to £500k in 2019, then 700,400 homebuyers in England would not have paid any Stamp Duty Tax.

95.7% of Sheffield properties sold last year were below £500k

Of the 9,980 properties sold in the last 12 months in Sheffield, 427 of those properties sold were over £500,000 (interesting when compared with Greater London where 44.9% of properties were below the £500k level).

Yet the cost to the HM Treasury would be significant. If all properties below £500k were exempt, the government would lose £2.22bn in tax receipts according to Savills. Of course, this could be made up with extra tax on empty properties or increasing the second homes Stamp Duty levy from the current 3% to say 5%, which would raise an additional £1.12bn on top of the current £1.68bn it raises for the Treasury, yet it would have a negative effect on buy-to-let landlords buying additional homes.

What almost unquestionably won’t happen is the earlier idea of switching the Stamp Duty liability from homebuyer to home seller

this would stall the property market, would probably cause political fallout among 688,300 homebuyers who paid Stamp Duty last year alone, make homes ‘appear’ more expensive as house sellers would inflate the asking price to try and recoup some of the tax, yet ultimately could be seen as ‘re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’....

Listen to the podcast or visit, https://wp.me/p7Mruo-2s8

Sheffield Homeowners £6,562,320,000 Windfall Since 2014

In the latest, and most recently published, set of UK mortgage data (for the month of November 2019) 18,470 pound-for-pound re-mortgages were made (i.e. the borrower went from one rate to another with no additional borrowing).

However, since the 1970’s, the British have seen their homes as cash cows and cash machines, with many homeowners re-mortgaging at the end of their mortgage’s introductory term (usually after the initial two, three or five years) to avoid being passed on to their mortgage lender’s more expensive standard variable rate.

For some borrowers re-mortgaging allows them an opportunity of raising additional cash whilst for others it enables them to follow interests and activities; such as big holidays, home improvements, new cars, debt consolidation or financially helping family members (e.g. paying off credit cards or helping with house deposits).

Interestingly, in November 2019 alone (the most recent figures) an eye watering £957,856,700 was borrowed on top of existing mortgages by 18,610 UK homeowners re-mortgaging and borrowing, on average, an additional £51,470. Therefore, one has to ask, are we borrowing too much? Looking at these numbers, one might think we are over-extending ourselves, yet as regular readers of my blog about the Sheffield property market will know – I like to drill down and look at the historical figures. Back in 2006, just before the crash, British homeowners were actually borrowing in excess of £5bn per month over and above the re-mortgage amount – much more than the £1bn we experienced in November!

Looking at statistics from the Bank of England for the UK as a whole, even with the data mentioned above, British property owners have increased the equity in their homes by just over £270 billion since 2010 compared with a £275 billion withdrawal during the 2000s. This reveals that the last decade (the 2010’s) is the first since records began in which Brits have increased their equity. This is partly due to the fact that the number of housing transactions crumpled during the Credit Crunch, and many homeowners chose to reduce their mortgages, rather than continually increasing them - even if their property started going up in value after 2013.

So, what has happened in Sheffield regarding mortgages and does it match the national picture? Well interestingly…

Sheffield homeowners have injected over six and a half billion pounds into their Sheffield properties over the last six years; overturning a trend stretching back to the 1970s.

Considering the exact figures, it can be seen whilst the total value of mortgages has increased slightly since 2014, as a percentage this has gone down, meaning Sheffield homeowners and Sheffield landlords have increased their equity since 2014 by £6,562,320,000 (one might call it a windfall?).

It can quite clearly be seen that the financial insecurity sparked by the Credit Crunch crisis has created a generation of Sheffield homeowners/landlords who are savers and improvers rather than movers and excessive borrowers, using excess cash to invest in their property and pay down debt or to excessively borrow on their equity growth, as can be seen on the graphs and table at https://wp.me/p7Mruo-2rL 

As the percentage of mortgages (the loan to value) has decreased since 2014 from 17.94% to 14.76% in Sheffield, this is good news for every Sheffield homeowner and Sheffield landlord because, irrespective of whether the ‘Boris Bounce’ is short or long lived, it shows the Sheffield property market is in a better state than ever before to ride out any storm that it might encounter because less people will be in negative equity or have prohibitively high mortgages.

Sheffield Landlord’s £50.8m Tax Bill

I am asking Gill Furniss, Paul Blomfield, Olivia Blake, Louise Haigh and Clive Betts the Labour MP’s covering Sheffield, to remind the Chancellor and Prime Minster Boris Johnson,  to use their persuasive skills to highlight and take a more holistic approach and attitude to the private rented sector and tackle issues which affect a Sheffield landlords’ capability and capacity to run an effective buy-to-let business.

For the last thirty years, the Government have passed responsibility of housing the masses from local authorities (i.e. council housing) to the estimated 1.5 million British buy-to-let landlords.

However, since 2015/16, Sheffield landlords have faced increasing tax burdens as each year goes by, with the removal of mortgage interest rate relief on income tax (Section 24), the introduction of the 3 percent surcharge on stamp duty, and the reduction of the letting relief on capital gains tax.

My research has calculated the total income tax contribution by 13,342 Sheffield private landlords in the tax year 2015/16 was £34,823,423

However, the eradication of higher rate mortgage interest relief (also known as Section 24) announced in 2015 by George Osborne has been estimated to add a further £1.9 billion nationally to landlord’s tax liability. Whilst raising money from landlords is an easy target, and the tax receipts attractive, it does make the landlords financial burden even heavier.

And by 2021/2, when the full extent of the Section 24 relief kicks in, that income tax liability will rise to £50,842,198

for those Sheffield landlords

This doesn’t even take into account additional liabilities such as Capital Gains Tax, the 3% additional duty on top of the prevailing Stamp Duty Land Tax and VAT.

Ambiguity and a lack of certainty is the foe of all investment, which has been seen with Brexit. Now, just as things are starting to get rosy in Q1 with the pent-up demand released with the ‘Boris Bounce’, the last thing we need as a ‘collective’ property industry is for the Government to see us landlords as a constant cash cow. This new Tory government must acknowledge the value the majority of private landlords who offer housing to in excess of 9.45 million people in the country.

Westminster needs to take a balanced approach to the significant issues

Such as possession (especially with the impeding removal of section 21 evictions),

taxation

and all rental properties needing to be at least an ‘E’ energy efficiency rating,

Westminster must put value on the private rented sector which effectively houses over a fifth of the population

and avoid unintentional consequences by making renting in the private sector harder for tenants … because, it’s not financially viable to buy (or retain) a buy-to-let property with the way things are going against the landlord and especially if things continue the way they are.

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Ah the 2010’s, the tens, the teens - I am not sure what we are supposed to call the decade that has just gone. No matter what it was called, the last decade was a tough one, so does it really matter that we never really got around to giving it a name? Some might say, whatever one calls it, coming to an end is the most fundamental job any teen (and I refer to all humans) could possibly do!

The last two decades have certainly been tumultuous. At least for this decade we have just started we can say, in a few decades time, things like “That style is so ’20s” and fellow humans will essentially know what you are talking about. If you come of age in this decade, you will be a ’20s child and we will discuss ’20s politics and ’20s style and all the things that hadn’t been created on the 31st December 2019; the time that two nameless decades ended and how finally there was something everyone in the UK could agree on: the name of the decade. Hey - it’s a start!

So, what has happened to the local Sheffield property market in the last nameless decade?

Listen to this episode or visit, https://sheffieldpropertyblog.com/sheffield-property-market-the-rollercoaster-of-the-last-decade

The Halifax announced in early January that there was a Boris Bounce in the national property market as they stated national property values soared 1.7% in December 2019 - the biggest rise since the 1.9% month on month rise in February 2007 (a few months before the Global Financial Crisis aka the Credit Crunch).

Get the flags out - all hail Boris as the Conservatives gain their landslide general election triumph - the Boris Bounce is here … or is it?

The Halifax (as well as the Land Registry and other house price indexes) use data of property that has sold and completed (completion being when monies and keys of homes sold are transferred). The Halifax data was based on properties that completed in December 2019, and as anyone who has sold or bought a Sheffield property in the last 10 years knows, the time it takes from agreeing a buying price to handing over the money is many weeks. In fact, the average length of time between sale agreed and completion in the country is running at 19 weeks, meaning the figures mentioned by the Halifax are for sales agreed in July / August 2019. This growth relates to what was happening to the property market in Summer 2019.

One of the most important things for the property market is confidence. Interestingly, Rightmove reported a 28% surge in buyer enquiries between the 13th December and 18th December. After a couple of years of Parliamentary hold-up, the confidence following this general election is unquestionably a much needed boost for the economy (and ultimately confidence), so much so, shares in the new homes builders Barratt jumped 14% and Persimmon 12% the day after the election, showing a property sector anticipation that the property market is about to move forward as suppressed demand for people moving home is liberated.

Looking at the previous elections, I decided to look at what happened to property values in Sheffield in the 12 months after each election, with some interesting results.

o, with past experience, a general election generally has a good effect rather than a worse effect on the Sheffield property market.

Looking at the rest of 2020, my intuition tells me in the better areas of Sheffield, it will likely be a seller’s market, as they will have more influence to ask for higher asking prices from Sheffield property buyers that have placed plans to move on hold for far too long - and this could push up Sheffield property values more promptly in the short term.

Yet, as more Sheffield properties come on to the market in the usual spring rush, we could see Sheffield home buyers having more choice and thus, as supply increases yet demand remains the same, buyers will get more power to negotiate a better deal. Irrespective of that, there is still the all-encompassing issue that I have spoken about many times in my blog of not enough homes being built to keep up with the number required, meaning negotiating power and prices being inflated.

The bottom line is, the Sheffield housing market will get a slight boost from the general election. The threat of a Jeremy Corbyn government obstructed some Sheffield landlords to build their buy to let portfolio in the later parts of 2019, so as long as sellers remain realistic with their pricing and present their properties in the best light, 2020 in the Sheffield property market should be a year of ‘steady as she goes’.

P.S .One final thought - remember what I said about the Halifax price Index being 5/6 months behind the times - don’t be alarmed when they announce in the March/April/May a reduction in property values - like I said before - this will be the prices achieved in the later parts of 2019 i.e. not what is happening right now. 

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