Format: Views
Cheques Please: Why new lending checks are absurd, counter productive, and won’t end well
New mortgage rules prefer corporate dullards to wealthy entrepreneurs, says our resident Doer Upper Alan Page, as he misses the joys of seeing a proper bank manager.
If you're rich you can't borrow
Prime Property of the Week: Bankside Story
Penthouse, NEO Bankside
£19.75m
The Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners-designed NEO Bankside scheme has won pretty much every property award going during its short existence, and rightly so.
Re
Lending Curbs: Is now really the time for action?
It's not as if lending institutions are throwing money at consumers; if anything, they're taking too long to process mortgage offers and putting a lag on responsible transactions, says Trevor Abrahmsohn...
Development Case Study: The Westminster office-to-resi scheme
Change of use may be all the rage in London, but how do you actually go about creating desirable, profitable units from an unloved office building? Here's how one firm transformed a Grade II* Georgian gem o…
London Cooling? Seems seasonable to me…
If London's property market is indeed 'cooling off' towards the summer months, that doesn't mean it's 'reaching stagnation'; surely what we're seeing happens in the capital every year, says Edo Mapelli Mo…
Interpreting Carney’s cautionary words on interest rates
The Governor is on the money this time but Cable seriously needs to update his information, says Trevor Abrahmsohn...
Interior Motive: Why you should be designing your scheme from the inside out
The exterior of a building may attract buyers initially, but it is a successfully designed interior that markets and sells a super-prime property, says Joe Burns...
Prime Property of the Week: The Grape Escape
Calistoga, Napa Valley, California
$100m
Letter from the Home Counties
Deep in the commuter belt, there's an emerging trend of families making a sideways move from a larger, older property into a new-build, says Darren Walter...
Tax Discredit: Why next year’s CGT changes could be a very bad idea
To continue to attract investors to our country, we need to offer the prospect of stronger returns than our European counterparts and that’s not going to be achieved by hiking up tax bills, says David Ha…
Prime Property of the Week: Super Hans
Hans Place, Knightsbridge
£13m
Named after the inventor of hot chocolate (and the British Museum), Hans Sloane, this splendid garden square is right in the Knightsbridge mixer.
Brussels Spouting: What a Cheek!
Our European counterparts are burdened with a particularly caustic mix of liabilities, and yet they still have the temerity to talk about our so called ‘overheated’ property market - what a cheek, says Tr…