Rental News

Fuzzy Households, Fuzzy Tenures

Housing careers used to be fairly straightforward - leave home, buy first home, move up housing ladder, perhaps trade down in retirement. Our world has changed, with more people now dipping in and out of home-ownership, owning property they do not live in, or living in property they do not own.  New research from the Council of Mortgage Lenders looks at the issues, and argues that policymakers should develop a more holistic approach to housing market issues.The main points of the report show

• As many as a fifth of first-time buyers are in fact "returners" who have at some point in the past been home-owners;
• The traffic is two-way: around 15% of people moving into private renting in 2005-6 were previously home-owners;
• A significant minority of people - around 10% - own a property that is not their current home, and this is sometimes instead of rather than in addition to their current home;
• The number of second homes in England has risen by 30% over the past decade;
• Around 900,000 men and 1.2 million women are couples "living apart together", who maintain their own individual properties;
• The rise of the tenant-cum-landlord: typically younger people who cannot afford to buy a property where they work, but buy one in a cheaper area and let it, to get a foot on the property ladder

To see the full report log onto http://www.cml.org.uk/cml/media/press/1522