The company A &J Mucklow who are located in Midlands has reported major loses to almost double following the collapse of commercial property values.

The company has a strategy to overcome this by investing in properties have fallen in price to increase their assets but at much lower prices that they would normally get them for.

They have secured a massive £35 million backing facility with HSBC and they also have £25 million for acquisitions.
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Mucklow remains very well positioned to ride out these turbulent times and benefit from the distressed market. We intend to utilise our new banking facilities to selectively acquire investment properties.”

Said Rupert Mucklow chairman

The dragons den star James Caan has been reported to be teaming up with ING for a new commercial fund for properties in the real estate.

His is launching it through his own private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw but he is still waiting on approval before he can finish, if it is all approved and goes to plan he has said it should be live by autumn.

Simon Latham is in charge of the property investment team at ING and he will have responsibility for administration and managing the fund while James Caan will act as the investment advisor, with him planning to invest around 10% of his personal funds into the plan.
James had this to say

My view is that the real estate market has hit the bottom, valuations have settled and there are opportunities to be had. Two years ago the property market got overheated but today you can acquire real estate at yields of between 7 and 8% at a cost of capital of 6%. Two years ago the cost of capital was also 6% but yields were only between 3 and 4%. This represents a near 30% shift in value and real estate is as attractive as it has been in a while.’

Miller Homes claims to have built a house that has zero carbon footprints in a effort to combat climate change

The meaning of zero carbon means that the house emits no carbon dioxide which is the biggest cause of the global climate change.

Miller Homes has made the houses as a development site in Basingstoke in Hampshire.

There are soon to be new rules which will say how the green homes of the future are to be built and they will become even tougher.

There is a concern that when these houses are made they will in turn increase new house prices at the same time.

The go ahead has been given by ministers to build 2,000 council houses across England.

The project is to cover forty seven areas and its being described as one of the biggest projects of its kind for over 20 years.

Social housing as now normally built by housing associations which accounted for almost 40,000 properties in 2008

The government has decided to split them into areas and the Midlands is going to have around 12 projects, the North West is planned to have 7 and Yorkshire and Humber will have 6, the South West is to have 6, the North East will have 4, and South East will also have 4 and last of all 1 in eastern England.

According to nationwide house prices have started to increase and have had the biggest increase last month but experts have said this is not the start of the housing boom.

Nationwide reported a 1.6 per cent increase in August to an average house of £160,000 and house prices are now only down 14.4 per cent compare to that of October 2007 when they were at the peak.

The reason why so many properties have not come on to the market is that because interest rates kept falling it meant that people were able to afford their larger mortgages and not forcing them to sell which in turn has helped house prices to start to recover.

According to a new poll the property market in the Gulf region is at the lowest its been and is holding back a recovery.

They need to restore the investors confidence to see them come out of the economic turndown, they also found that 36 per cent of the people who took part in the poll said that properties where holding back and they have seen up to 50 per cent drop in prices

They said that investors still think that they will drop even more and there for they are waiting for them to drop before they put their money into them and buy.

A report on Friday has found out that since the credit crunch started two years ago the real estate and construction companies have been hit the worse by the global downturn.

1573 companies when bust in the second quarter of 2007 when compared to 696 in the third quarter of the same year.

24 per cent of the insolvencies have been made up of developers, investors and agencies. With the downturn the hotel industry has also been affected as banks don’t want to lend money to help companies out.

Despite the rise of the ’staycation’ UK hotel groups are going under at a faster rate than ever … banks are understandably reluctant to lend to companies whose underlying assets are based on property a comment by Anthony Cork.

The national housing fund CFV has found from its research that housing corporations are building around 12 per cent fewer homes for rent and this is also expected for the next 5 years.

The reason why they are building less is the maintenance and the management of the properties has risen and there for leaving them with less money to spend, they also now have to pay corporation tax which is also eating in to their spends. Which is said to total around 500 million Euros this year?

The costs for renting the property cannot be passed on to the clients as that rent rises to line with inflation.

Property fund manger Activium is looking to Germany for attractive deals on property and avoiding the UK as house prices are still falling, they plan to spend around £350 million in Europe in 3 years with commercial property in Germany being its favourite.

Saul Goldstein the founder and partner of Activum in Jersey said

Germany is still one of the most attractive real estate markets in the world … rents and values have been relatively stable.

They hope to return to their investors around one and a half to two and a half times their investments over a time scale of 7 years

Mortgages are now on the rise with them leaping a massive 26% then last month which is a great sign that the industry is on the way up allowing more people to look into changing their property

The Council of mortgage lenders said that a staggering £16 billion in mortgages were approved in July and it is has also been noticed that house prices are still continuing to rise over the past months.

But let’s stay realistic about it as the housing market is not bouncing back as mortgages are usually approved at this time of year and they are still down by 36% compared to that of last year.