You can tell, can’t you, that Mr. Balls has had his ears ‘chewed off’ by the anxious Labour MPs in the south, particularly in London (Tessa Jowell and Glenda Jackson), by the fearsome backlash from the Mansion Tax proposals that is now the main plank of their manifesto policies.

Having ‘stolen’ another policy from the Lib Dems, in the absence of any other more worthy and imaginative proposal, they are now back-tracking in order to prevent potential Labour supporters in London ‘biting them on the butt’.  Do you sense a wafting of the reflux caused by the dropping of the 10p tax rate by Mr. ‘Inglorious’ Brown? Continue reading →

I despair. Not three months ago, Vince Cable and Mark Carney were worried about ‘a run away’ residential property bubble and I commented, at the time, that they seem to be detached from what was going on in ‘the trenches’.

Again, as I predicted, the London property market was cooling down significantly, even in the lower price ranges.  The high price range properties have shown no price growth whatsoever recently and the market outside of the villages of Central London, at the higher end, is 10-15% below its peak two years ago. Continue reading →

I have ‘seen out’ four recessions and I have been ‘treading the boards’ now in residential estate agency for over 40 years and I can see ‘the writing on the wall’.  Mansion Tax is a punitive tax on aspiration; it will not raise any money at all but will certainly cause mayhem in property values, principally in London, which will put the fledgling UK recovery at risk. Here are a few thoughts:

Q: How easily will Mansion Tax be implemented?
A: The Courts/Tribunals will be besieged with claims and counter claims disputing values, particularly at around £2million, and nothing will be paid until these are resolved and that could take years.

Continue reading →