House prices still slowly grow but constructions is lagging behind

Housing market is cooling down by ...becoming hotter

Rents for prime London up 11% whilst supply declines as construction slows down

• House price growth at just 0.1% has been the lowest since December 2019, according to Zoopla and is expected to halve by year end.
• However 2022 has already been expensive: the average first-time buyer paid £25,000 more, compared to 2021. This tallies to £234,468 or an increase of 12% in the last year.
• 😊 In the next few months a further cooling is expected, says Nationwide.
• 😤 Buyers, curb your enthusiasm: supply of new builds is becoming worse in London. It has halved between 2017 and 2021 (from 34,000 units to 17,000) Molior London reports and it will continue declining, as a result of increasing construction costs and taxation. Combined with inflation and supply chain issues, this creates a suffocating environment for housing in London and the UK.
• As a result of this ☝️ undersupply house prices in London will not decrease, says the London developer. 
• 71% of construction companies surveyed reported higher purchasing prices in June, bringing the business optimism at its lowest since July 2022.
• 11.1% is the increase in rental values for prime London properties, says Savills - see Figure.

• The demand on the other side is undiminished as people rush to buy. New mortgages granted totalled £7.4bn, up from £4.2bn in April, says Bank of England. Signalling, perhaps, the rush of buyers ahead of increasing rates. At the same time borrowing and credit card spending was £600M down. No surprise here.
• HSBC and Nationwide have increased variable mortgage rates. HSBC has increased its residential standard variable rate (SVR) from 4.04 per cent to 4.29 per cent. Nationwide said it had increased its base mortgage rate (BMR) from 2.75 per cent to three per cent and its standard mortgage rate (SMR) will be increased from 4.24 per cent to 4.49 per cent.
• People also prefer town centres. Savills reports that more than a quarter of all build-to-rent developments completed between 2015-2020 were in town and city centres. Covid-19 surely has impacted urban centres; nevertheless the need of humans to be with other humans is still here :)
• A new Threshold report shows that just 14% of those surveyed in Ireland say they are renting by choice. Another 62% is unable to buy; this was 48% 2 years ago.

💡 'Hood in the spotlight: City of London

Arts, music festivals, outdoor events and collaborative workspaces to attract young people in the Square Mile

City of London is not only about businessCity of London has plans to reinvent Square Mile as a fun 24/7 district with frequent large outdoor festivals and arts events. It seems that people are not coming back to work in the office as they used to in pre-Covid and the City experiences a 30-40% decrease on the 530,000 daily commuters (interestingly Google data supports this finding!). Not unrelated, UBS is now subletting its landmark City headquarters in a move to mitigate losses from empty offices. As City is recovering from Covid it might “never go back to the old normal”, as the City of London policy chief said.

☀️ In the meantime, you can enjoy one of the free roof terraces with amazing views of the City or appreciate the largest greenfield site in central London. Or maybe just wander in the beautiful streets; who knows, you might stumble upon Marvel or Netflix filming crew ;)

How many music festivals does the UK have?

Is the UK the best country for music festivals?

Believe it or not, skiddle.com listed 241 festivals in the UK in 2020! This is insane, especially if you consider that no other European country is even close to this number. Wikipedia lists just 30-40 festivals occurring in one of UK's 'festival competitors', i.e. Norway, the Netherlands or Germany. Only in Australia, Canada and the United States we saw above 150 recurring events.

This makes the UK an extremely dense space for music and greenfield festivals that reflects the strong tradition in this country. Why is that? We don't know! But we do go ahead, travel and enjoy!

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