Housing market

Our pick of the big stories

The Conservative Party will promise a £1bn fund for building 400,000 new properties on brownfield sites as part of two big housing announcements in its manifesto unveiled later today.

The housing market recovery helped stamp duty revenues soar by a fifth in 2014-2015 to a record high of £8bn, according to research.

Two financial services firms have teamed up with property surveyors to fuel their growth strategies and benefit from new revenue streams in the UK housing market.

High street bank mortgage approvals were down 20% in November compared with the year before, new figures from the British Bankers' Association (BBA) have shown.

Advisers have welcomed the Chancellor's overhaul of the taxation system around buying property, saying it is an "ingenious" idea that will benefit the majority of clients.

The government is to do away with the existing 'single slab' approach to stamp duty on residential property purchases, introducing a new tiered charge from 4 December.

The Bank of England may find monetary policy such as raising interest rates "the only game in town" to combat financial stability risks such as the housing market, the deputy governor has warned.

Lloyds, the UK's biggest lender, has put an immediate cap on income multiples on mortgages over £500,000 to primarily target the London market in a bid to combat the capital's swiftly rising property price inflation.

Prominent economists have added to calls for the government to pull back from the mortgage guarantee element of its Help to Buy initiative, arguing it is no longer needed.