Invest & Fund Blog

Last week's blog set out what is on the table: a petition through the 100,000 threshold, a Prime Minister declining to rule out a proportional property tax, a land value tax or a lower mansion tax threshold, and a decision realistically deferred to the autumn Budget. This part deals with the consequence that matters to anyone building or funding housing, what any of it...

In this week's blog, in part one of two, we look more closely at a petition to scrap council tax and stamp duty and replace both with a single annual property tax that has passed 100,000 signatures, which means Parliament has to debate it. The proposal behind it, from campaign group Fairer Share, is a Proportional Property Tax: a flat annual charge of 0.48% of a home's...

RICS's latest Residential Market Survey, covering June 2026, carries a notably more upbeat tone than anything the industry has published in months, which, in fairness, wasn’t too difficult given the trajectory much of the commentary has been on. The institution's Head of Market Research and Analysis describes the results as offering cautious encouragement that the wors...

If you wanted to design a laboratory experiment to test what happens to the UK housing market when the entire country stops paying attention, you could hardly improve on the summer of 2026. Six weeks of record temperatures, and when I say record temperatures, we are now almost in “post too hot”; we have been too hot for so long now, we can’t remember what fresh air fee...

There was a time, not so many moons ago, and not fondly remembered by anyone who underwrote through it, when contingency was arguably the soft part of a development appraisal. The number everyone knew would be squeezed. Build costs were hardened, professional fees were benchmarked, but contingency sat there as the line a broker could shave to make a marginal deal stack...