Interview with Andrew Montlake from Coreco Mortgages

January 11th, 2020 by Ruban Selvanayagam

An interview with Andrew Montlake, director at Coreco, a London-based mortgage brokerage and owner of Monty’s Mortgage Blog. We’d also recommend checking out Andrew’s latest commentary for our 2020 forecast blog post… (1) For those that don’t know much about you, can you give us a little bit of background of your own experience and also what you do at Coreco? I started in the mortgage industry at John Charcol in 1994 where I worked my way up from an administrator to a senior broker. After 7 years I left to join a new company called Cobalt Capital, where as well as broking I developed the brand, marketing and PR. In the aftermath of the credit crisis, we all got made redundant and a few of us founded Coreco in 2009. Here I invented the brand and grew this as Head of PR... [Read More]

Property Investor’s FactFile – January 2020

January 4th, 2020 by Ruban Selvanayagam

- According to the latest UK House Price Index, average house prices saw an annual price rise of 0.7% (to October 2019); - The latest Hometrack UK Cities House Price Index reported that Edinburgh saw the greatest year-on-year house price growth at 5.4%. This was followed by Manchester (4.7%), Leicester (4.5%), Birmingham (4.1%), Nottingham (3.9%) and Liverpool (3.8%); - The most recent Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) report stated that Buyer enquiries and new instructions continue to fall (although the pace of decline eases); near term sales expectations turn marginally positive for the coming three months and respondent surveyors anticipate prices will return to growth over the next twelve months; - See a range of insights and forecasts via this year's property expert forecast post (link available in post). [Read More]

Value of a Professional Property Condition Assessment

January 1st, 2020 by admin

If you are planning to purchase a property or lease a building long term, it makes financial sense to assess any problems and deficiencies that need to be replaced or repaired. Some issues require specific maintenance procedures that might be ongoing and expensive. If you don’t know what these are you can end up with an investment that costs you money rather than one that is financially worthwhile. Professional property condition assessments are designed to identify faults so that the implications of these can be considered by potential buyers or those planning to lease a building. They reveal the condition of the building in terms of the site, the structural frame and thermal envelope including the roof, plumbing, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC), electrics, and any other equipment from escalators and elevators, to safety and fire protection devices and systems.... [Read More]

Expert Property Market Forecasts (2020)

January 1st, 2020 by Ruban Selvanayagam

Welcome to the 2020 property market expert commentary post… Released slightly later than the 2019 and 2018 editions, we chose to collate the majority of the contributions in light of the late 2019 election in an attempt to keep things relatively current. Reactions to the Tory landslide and, unsurprisingly, the impact on property resulting from UK’s imminent departure from the EU pervade across many of this year’s contributions (the ‘B’ word is mentioned no less than 88 times!). Housing affordability also continues to raise cause for concern for the medium-term sustainability of the market, particularly in the South. A broad consensus remains that financial accessibility and high deposit requirements will remain a constraint to aggressive price growth witnessed over the first half of the previous decade. Nonetheless, for investors, the opportunities presented in areas across the Midlands and the North shouldn’t be ignored.... [Read More]