Should I wait to buy because Brexit might make house prices fall?

I’m trying to buy a property in Oxfordshire but some friends say I should hold off on the deal

Q I am trying to buy a property in Oxfordshire but some of my friends have advised me to postpone any purchase because of the possibility of a no-deal Brexit. Some people believe property prices will go up while others believe that prices will fall. So I can’t decide whether it’s the right time to buy or whether I should wait. Can you tell me what to do?
RG

A No, I can’t tell you what to do and nor can I predict the type of Brexit we’ll end up with next March or how it will affect house prices. But I can shed light on what the experts think. The governor of the Bank of England. Mark Carney, has warned that if it all goes horribly wrong and we face a “disorderly” Brexit (which means a no-deal one), the economy will suffer, unemployment, consumer prices and interest rates could rise while – in a worst case scenario – house prices could fall by as much as 25% to 30%. So your friends who think that house prices will fall could have a point. On the other hand, so could your friends who think that house prices will rise – although it’s more a case of prices rising but not quite as quickly as they were predicted to pre-EU referendum. Back in February this year, experts were predicting that house prices would stop going up or, at the very least, go up by no more than 1%. They weren’t far off but according to figures recently published by the Office for National Statistics, average house prices in the UK have, in fact,  increased by 3.1% in the year to July 2018 (down from 3.2% in the year to June 2018).

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A guide to inheritance tax https://t.co/3avLoxoCVS #conveymove #estateagentsnottingham https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM

A guide to inheritance tax https://t.co/3avLoxoCVS #conveymove #estateagentsnottingham https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM (via Twitter http://twitter.com/conveyandmove/status/1046630835338850304)

A guide to inheritance tax Nottingham Estate Agents

Changes to the Inheritance Tax system could have far-reaching implications for homeowners Recent post-Budget analysis may have concentrated on the U-turn over National Insurance for the self-employed, but another tax change introduced on 6 April 2017 could have far-reaching implications for homeowners. This tax change means parents and grandparents are able to leave homes worth […]

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Forget the pledges to act – London is still a haven for dirty Russian money | Oliver Bullough

After Salisbury, the Tories said we would get tough on rich Russians. But billionaires are still coming and sanctions are nowhere to be seen

Britain, we’re told, has a new policy on dirty Russian money. We are finally pulling the red carpet from under the feet of the rich Russians who have turned London into a private members’ club.

This new “hostile environment” was trailed in February after the security minister, Ben Wallace, watched McMafia – “We know what they are up to and we are not going to let it happen anymore,” he told the Times – in an onslaught of media announcements that has since become more intense. After the novichok attack in Salisbury, a headline in the Sun told us wealthy Russians were unwelcome. These are, an article on Bloomberg announced “the last days of Londongrad”.

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A five-minute fix for growing tastier, healthier veg

Sprinkle Epsom salts on to your soil to enhance the health and flavour of your winter crops

I may never learn to love the dark days of winter, but the wonderful thing about horticulture is that there is always a silver lining, particularly if you are a veg grower. Even as many plants around us slide into dormancy, there is a range of winter veg that can be planted now and which will look after itself for months at a time. Not only are these arguably the easiest of all seasonal crops to grow, but with a simple five-minute trick of mine you could also make them measurably tastier and more nutritious than most of what you can buy in the shops.

Autumn-planting onion and shallot sets are in stores everywhere right now and, once planted according to packet instructions in a well-tended bed, should require almost zero intervention from you until harvest. The same deal applies to garlic and a little known fourth member of the family, the echalote grise, also called (rather confusingly) the French grey shallot. Although neither French nor a shallot, this is in my opinion the finest flavoured of all the onion family. Spring onions can, likewise, be sown now from seed for harvesting from late winter to early spring.

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The slow pleasures and melancholy of autumn gardening

Fading light and failing growth brings its own beauty to the garden

So the autumn equinox is over, October mere hours away. I know I have been banging on about fading light now for a month, but it is no longer deniable. This morning saw the last pre-7am sunrise until we return to GMT – and then it’s only temporarily.

I don’t want to sound like a harbinger of doom and dark, though I’ll admit to some seasonal melancholy. I watch the slowing of September seed now sluggish in its growth. Plants that surged only a month or so before are struggling a little more.

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A London flat’s smoke and mirrors trickery: ‘I like to seek out the unusual’

A giant glass cube gives a sci-fi twist to this London flat, partly reflecting its former resident Tom Baker, AKA the Doctor

It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the black that wraps around the walls and ceilings of Linda Allen and Darin Brown’s flat, which occupies the ground floor of a Victorian redbrick in London’s Belsize Park. Then there’s the slightly disorientating effect of a wall of mirror glass between the living room and their bedroom. Except, this shiny expanse isn’t a wall at all. Linda and Darin got rid of that and replaced it with a glass-clad cube. “We wanted it to look as if a big shiny box had dropped down from outer space,” explains Linda. “We left a gap at the top and the bottom so it appears to hover, like a separate entity.”

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