You wouldn’t necessarily want to live next door to Dubai. Not if you were concerned about neighbourly one-upmanship.
Call that a garden shed? Look, my friend, our new garden shed is an 800 metre spinning tower built in the shape of a palm tree with an Alpine ski slope in the basement…
The latest in Dubai’s quest [...]

The publication of the CML’s half-yearly stats on BTL lending generated a lot of ‘end is nigh’ headlines … Such as:
•    The Buy-To-Let Chickens Come Home To Roost (Guardian)
•    Buy-To-Let Backfires (Daily Mail)
Not quite sure what a backfiring chicken coming home to roost would look like, but you get the general idea… investors are in [...]

Some interesting responses to the No Money Down (NMD) blog I did a week or so ago, including one from Simon Zutshi, whose report on the state of buy-to-let kicked it all off.
I ended my musings by noting that there was, as yet, no sign of his new mortgage strategy. Well now there is, in [...]

What the … eh? … awww ain’t it cute!
The latest offering from achingly trendy design mavericks SuckUK has sparked a bit of a heated debate here in the FAP Editorial Suite.
Well, it did once we’d all stopped laughing like loons at the sight of this slightly indignant looking cat ‘flying’ a WWII plane.
Look, he seems [...]

News reaches us of harsh happenings over at The Shire. The Hobbits, it seems, are facing an enemy of truly awesome proportions.
Not the demonic Lord Sauron with his Cradle of Filth threads; not the bad ass Black Riders; not even the plug ugly Orcs with their anger issues and gross dental hygiene …
Nah, this is [...]

Here’s a little multiple choice question for you.
Buy-to-let will:
A. Contract significantly as landlords cut their losses and sell, sell, sell
B. Hold firm in the short term and expand thereafter as landlords rake in the profits thanks to rising demand
Skandia, the savings and pensions chappies, would definitely put their tick next to ‘A’ – [...]

Fuel and food prices are on the up, house prices are on the slide and the papers are full of features telling us all how to atone for our ten-year credit binge and mega splurge down the shops.
Now, it seems, is the time to make do and mend, to grow [...]

Pssst! Fancy a real bargain? A property at well below its genuine market value? And how about nabbing it without using any of your own money?
Ok. Now find a few more cut-price lovelies, repeat the process, and you, me old mucka, will be well on your way to becoming a champagne sipping, Ferrari driving, villa-in-the-south-of-France-owning  [...]

I get regular news bulletins and opinion pieces from the excellent MoneyWeek, and they’re usually fairly feisty – especially when it comes to the housing market.
Last week John Stepek got in a right old strop when he read a piece in the FT suggesting that all is not lost because there is still a lot [...]

Two recent headlines, published within a day of one another.
•    House prices to ‘plunge a third by 2010′ – This is Money.
•    House prices ‘up by 25 per cent by 2013′ – The Guardian.
The first is based on a report from Roger Bootle of Capital Economics. The second is based on a report produced for [...]