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Housing market boost from Taylor Wimpey
5 Aug 2009Confidence in the housing market took a boost as prices looked to have bottomed out and builder Taylor Wimpey said summer sales were solid.
While refusing to call a bottom to the crisis yet, Taylor Wimpey said recent months had proved far better than it had expected. Prices were stabilising and sales of new homes, as well as the number of potential buyers nosing around, had increased.
“The early summer selling season has been solid and visitor levels remain encouraging,” said chief executive Peter Redfern. “We are cautiously optimistic about trading conditions for the remainder of the year.”
The first of the major housebuilders to report first-half-of-the-year results, Taylor Wimpey still had to make huge writedowns - of £527 million - to the value of its land and work in progress. That meant losses for the six months widened to £681.9 million.
Britain's biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, today reported house prices rising 1.1% in July, meaning prices have fallen by less than 1% so far this year.
Meanwhile, it emerged that off-plan buying was returning to the capital, as one of the capital's luxury residential developments - a luxury apartment block in Westminster's Rochester Row - had received a huge take-up. Almost half the flats have been snapped up at the Barratt site.
Reader views (2)
Confusing a supply shortage with a recovery here. We still are in a property bubble with price to earnings ratio of 5 with some way down to go. Add in falling incomes and rocketing unemployment you can see that this lull is little more than a bull trap. And to go around thanking Brown! Mr Brown has not abolished boom and bust, he did save the world's banking system, and he now thinks he is now in the process of saving the planet from catastrophic overheating by trying to turn the G8 into a "King of the Canutes" competition. The man is bonkers.
Our finances are in a worse state than when Callaghan and Healey approached the IMF. At least, having wrecked the economy, they were then responsible enough to admit it and ask for help. Brown would rather see us all begging in rags than admit to a mistake.
- Thrift, London, UK, 05/08/2009 13:03
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Well done Gordon Brown for rescuing the country from the worldwide economic recession, which has hit many other countries far harder than it has us here in the UK
- Keith Price, Luton England, 05/08/2009 10:46
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