All articles by Brian Green – Page 34

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    Observations on Beckett's first speech as housing minister: 2

    2008-10-16T16:21:00Z

    There was one intriguing bit in Margaret Beckett's speech to the Housing Market Intelligence conference yesterday that baffled me at the time and I am glad to say baffled others.She said: "On land supply, there may be ways that we can reduce the risk to new developments, by bringing forward ...

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    Observations on Beckett's first speech as housing minister: 1

    2008-10-16T15:52:00Z

    I spent yesterday at the Housing Market Intelligence conference in London. Naturally I found it excellent. Of course I would say that as I'm involved in it.Bias taken into account, here is just one of a many of observations from the conference.Margaret Beckett gave her first speech as the newly ...

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    Bright spots in the gloom says Experian's latest construction forecast

    2008-10-16T13:40:00Z

    I've just received an email from James Hastings, head of construction futures at Experian Business Strategies with the latest forecast update attached.And, not a surprise, it was gloomier than the summer forecast, which then saw the industry overall stumbling rather than plunging into recession this year and next. It is ...

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    A hint of comfort in the icy housing market

    2008-10-14T09:51:00Z

    If you take an optimistic view of life you may find some comfort in the latest housing market survey from the surveyors' body RICS.For pessimists there remains plenty of scope for concern.A glimmer of hope can be found in the fact that the survey found that in some regions there ...

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    Could anyone have seen this coming? Well, yes actually

    2008-10-13T13:29:00Z

    Normality is finally being rewritten - the world is waking up to the fact that the past decade or so was extraordinary and bred extraordinary folly.Accompanying this awakening I hear the phrase "no one could have seen this coming" so often of late. I may have used the phrase myself.So, ...

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    Future market expects a near 40% fall in house prices

    2008-10-13T12:09:00Z

    The futures market has unsurprisingly taken an even darker view of house prices over the past month as the Tradition Future HPI latest figures show.The market now puts the peak to trough fall in the average house price at 38% (as measured on the Halifax non-seasonally adjusted index). And this ...

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    Construction faces a worse recession than in the 1990s, says forecast

    2008-10-09T16:11:00Z

    My good friend Martin Hewes passed me a copy of the latest forecast from Hewes & Associates. It's not good news, I'm afraid. His last forecast was pretty bleak, this is bleaker still.The headline figure of note is the 11.3% drop in new work next year. With a slightly more ...

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    Down again and more house price falls to follow

    2008-10-09T10:53:00Z

    Another month, another fall in the Halifax house price index.And we can expect that to continue for some while yet, despite the cash transfusion pumped into the financial system and the monetary defibrillation provided by a concert of central banks cutting interest rates.The patient is ill and recovery will take ...

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    After the banks are nationalised - will we see a renaissance of public works?

    2008-10-08T11:12:00Z

    One question has been twitching at the back of my brain for some weeks now.It is this: If the Government is prepared to invest "whatever it takes" to get the wheels of the "unreal" economy that is banking back on the rails, then will it be prepared to invest "whatever ...

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    Houses set for a revival as flats wane in the wake of credit crunch

    2008-10-07T20:36:00Z

    If one thing epitomised the boom years in the housing market it was the building of high-density blocks of apartments that were sucked up off plan by eager investors.The credit crunch has changed all that. Outside of London dense schemes of flats are rapidly going out of fashion.Having been for ...

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    Surveyors smell an ill wind across all construction

    2008-10-06T14:13:00Z

    The RICS construction survey provides a valuable early indicator of workload trends, so its latest figures showing the slump widening out from house building is cause for concern.You don't see too many charts showing sentiment collapse as fast as it appears to have looking at the charts produced by the ...

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    House building in the history books

    2008-10-06T13:30:00Z

    The surveyors' body RICS seems pretty convinced that annual rate of house building in England will fall below 100,000, unless of course something dramatic happens to pick the market up - what who knows?This had me wondering just how low this puts the house building industry compared to periods in ...

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    Forecasters see an £8 billion drop for construction work by 2010

    2008-10-03T10:53:00Z

    So the latest stab by the Construction Products Association to make sense of the economic chaos suggests that construction output will fall 7% over the next three years. That is a loss in cash terms of about £8 billion in work by 2010.The pace of decline in sentiment within construction ...

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    With recession a near certainty, the question is how deep

    2008-10-02T11:43:00Z

    The latest new orders figures and CIPS survey leave little if any room for doubt, construction is dropping into a recession fast and the drop looks deep.The more worrying thing about the figures is that last year forecasters were looking to the private sector to make up for expected falls ...

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    When even words of comfort are frightening

    2008-10-02T10:33:00Z

    The most profoundly worrying thing about the latest Nationwide house price index press release was a comment from Fionnuala Earley, the building society's chief economist, which I think, in the context it was placed, was meant to be soothing.Now I may be misinterpreting her words, but either way they are ...

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    Materials imports surge despite slowdown

    2008-10-01T15:41:00Z

    Despite a slowdown in workload, particularly in house building, the construction industry is spending more than ever on imported products and materials.Imports in the second quarter of this year leapt by almost 10% (more than £300 million) on the previous quarter to £3.47 billion, despite a reduction in the massive ...

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    A 1990s revival: Dutch auctions, suicidal bidding and payment delays are back

    2008-10-01T11:37:00Z

    I wasn't expecting it. I had a ring round of some long-standing contacts that I speak to fairly regularly.I guess I last spoke to them a couple of months ago, as things were starting to look a bit stickier with the figures heralding a dip in construction output.My chat with ...

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    Two years of US house price falls and more to come

    2008-09-30T17:36:00Z

    The latest release of the Case-Shiller index shows that house prices in the US have now fallen in every month for the past two years.The price of an average US home on the 20 city index measure is now 19.5% cheaper than it was in August 2006.But in some cities ...

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    South West housing deals hit hardest as market slowed

    2008-09-30T11:39:00Z

    If the health of the housing market is a function of turnover and price growth then the amount of stamp duty taken from residential sales should provide a fairly good means of diagnosis. In rough and ready terms.So it was interesting to see how each region fared in the regional ...

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    Is buy-to-let really screwed? No, according to the figures. But...

    2008-09-29T15:00:00Z

    What is all this about the "particularly hard-hit buy-to-let market" I keep hearing about in reports about the demise of Bradford & Bingley?The thing is, I tend to follow the figures a bit and was not aware of any of the "reliable" variety that had pointed to BTL being "particularly ...