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Housing minister Grant Shapps has scrapped complicated blanket HMO planning rules for houses in multiple occupation (HMO). He has announced new regulations aimed at cutting 8,500 HMO applications from the planning system every year by removing the need for every new HMO to apply...

David Whittaker, managing director, said: ?We now have more than 200 products on the system, something we haven?t seen for three years. The contrast with May 2009, when we were down to roughly 40 products, is stark.? Recently The Mortgage Works increased the number of buy-to-let...

An NLA survey of LHA landlords has found that as many as 90% of private landlords could be less likely to take on a tenant receiving benefits if proposed cuts announced in the budget go ahead. Over one million tenants receive housing benefits and the Department for Work and...

Shelter commissioned YouGov to conduct an online survey of 2,234 GB Adults – 2% of whom said they have fallen victim to a scam involving a private tenancy or landlord. This equates to around one million people in Great Britain. Despite Government claims that current laws do...

Writing in his blog at www.charcol.co.uk Boulger said: ?No doubt the reason Andrew Lilico, chief economist of Policy Exchange, which calls itself a think tank, chose to issue his paper forecasting we would see 8 per cent interest rates in 2012… is that in the August silly...

Nationwide cuts remortgage rates by up to 0.20 per cent on selected remortgage products. The rate cuts will improve the competitiveness of Nationwide’s remortgage range and the average cut will be 0.15 per cent. The remortgage product range from Nationwide will include the...

The news, which will see the reduction come into force from Monday next week (23rd August), comes just days after the lender reduced mortgage rates across its entire range. The move takes the mortgage application fee for purchase customers down from ?250 to ?99, and is one of the...

It follows recent data released by the National Landlords Association (NLA) showing a fifth of private-residential landlords had tenants in rent arrears during Q2 2010. Whilst one-third of landlords had never sought to end a tenancy, the survey found 23.3% had because of...