The Clapham Property Blog

All too often are those words spoken... "it's a great investment, right?" "Well, buying a new build is hardly going to give you the best rental return, let alone capital appreciation..." "But it will go up eventually right?" That is true... property, most of the time, appreciates if you give it long enough. Time to revisit a nifty article I wrote a while back ( High Yield HMOs vs Low Yield New Build ) to dig up a graph that I made to demonstrate this exact point. The point being that you pay for the "shiny factor" in the new build, or newly refurbished home.  Now there could of course be a multitude of reasons to buy a new build or newly developed property. Time is the primary one of course. Those with busy jobs cannot afford to invest the time into sourcing new bathrooms, flooring, paint, dealing with tradesmen and so forth, that much is true. Money is another. In the case of first time buyers using the help-to

You read the personal finance pages of the newspapers and it all seems to be the impending pensions crisis ... where people aren’t saving enough for their retirement. But it’s not the lack of Clapham peoples’ future pension incomes that are my immediate concern. The fact is that so many of the future retirees in Clapham over the coming decade, who never bought their home in the Millennial years of the 1990’s and 2000’s, will have to make some tough decisions regarding what house they live in when they retire anytime between now and 2038. In Clapham (or SW4 to be exact), there are 193 privately rented households, where the head of the household is between 50 years and 64 years of age (meaning they will be retiring anytime between now and 2038). They are working now and easily paying the rent, yet what happens when they retire? A Clapham retired couple, who currently privately rent and who have paid their fully qualifying NI stamp over the last few decades are likely to reti