Blog

With less than 100 days to go until the Olympics the country certainly seems to be in the grip of sports fever. Whether you are turning on the telly, travelling home on public transport, or reading a magazine you can’t get away from the vast numbers of lycra clad Olympians all vying for our attention (and suggesting we buy the brand of hair care product, face cream, snack bar, energy drink etc that  they are endorsing).

When I heard the story of Robbie Tomkins my heart went out to him.

Who is this Robbie you might ask? Well, he is the man whose plight journalist Ruth Bloomfield described in last week’s Evening Standard property supplement. Robbie and his two friends were left without a home only hours before they were set to move into rented accommodation, because they had been gazumped.

As I write my blog on Valentine’s Day my thoughts turn to the love that is currently being shown to the rental market by both the public and private sectors.

As the new managing director of Roomservice by CORT I am taking over from Roger Hollis as the author of the Roomservice by CORT blog.

As Christmas rushes towards us at breakneck speed, thoughts automatically start turning towards the new year ahead and the opportunities it will bring. Most people like to have little watersheds to divide one part of their life from another – a new start, if you will – and these don’t come any more definite than at the start of a new year. The possibilities seem endless.

It’s been a pretty interesting week for those of us that take an interest in the UK’s housing market and the challenges it faces. The big news, of course, was the announcement by the Government of a series of initiatives ostensibly designed to promote more house building and assist first-time buyers.

A report by the Intergenerational Foundation – a think tank established to ‘promote fairness between generations’ and based on the belief that each generation should ‘pay its own way’ – has revealed that the UK has somewhere in the region of 25 million bedrooms currently unoccupied.

Back in June, I wrote about the inadequacies of buy-to-let investment and how the model was causing distortions in the residential property market, distortions that were exacerbating the problems of tenure security, accommodation quality and the crowding out of first-time buyers.

Dispatches – Channel 4’s flagship current affairs documentary series – has a long and distinguished history of exposing exploitation and corruption across a number of spheres of British society. But even regular viewers will have been shocked by the programme’s Monday night investigation into sub-standard rental properties.

Is it just me, or is there a growing backlash against buy-to-let investment? For so long the darling of the broadsheets’ money sections, buy-to-let properties seem to be increasingly viewed as a tool of private gain but also of social loss. A number of articles and publications have been indicative of the changing opinions towards buy-to-let as an investment class.