Will I have to pay the higher rate stamp duty on new property?

I’m buying the house with a new partner, but I am still named on a previous mortgage

Q Shortly before my ex-wife and I separated, we bought a house together. We are now divorced and both have new partners. I am still named on the mortgage and until recently was a joint tenant on the property with my now ex-wife.

I have just signed the paperwork to sever the joint tenancy and will become tenants in common. I also have no beneficial interest in the property since the date of our separation. My ex-wife is legally bound by court order to use all endeavours to release me from the mortgage on the property by May 2020.

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Welcome to Manc-hattan: how the city sold its soul for luxury skyscrapers

Giant towers are sprouting up all over Manchester. But how will sky lounges and penthouse olive groves help the city’s rocketing homelessness problem?

‘Hell upon Earth” is how Friedrich Engels described Manchester’s Angel Meadow. This violent, squalid, disease-ridden district was one of the worst slums the revolutionary German thinker encountered on his tour of Victorian England. Everything about the place, he wrote in 1844, “arouses horror and indignation”.

Visiting today, he might be tempted to use the same words, for very different reasons. On either side of the leafy park, which undulates over the graves of 40,000 Victorian paupers, the bulky concrete frames of new apartment blocks are beginning to rise. They will ultimately become 17- and 22-storey slabs that will in turn be dwarfed by a 41-storey tower, all surrounding the park with a glacial wall of “ultra-sleek urban homes”. And not a single one affordable.

This is MeadowSide, a £200m development by the Far East Consortium, a Hong Kong developer registered in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. This site – once the gateway to medieval Manchester and depicted in the paintings of LS Lowry – is being ripped up to make way for 756 luxury homes, many already sold off-plan to investors in Hong Kong. Brochures in the marketing suite describe it as a place “where glass meets grass and concrete meets conkers”. It’s also where the forces of international capital meet a city seemingly open to investment at any cost.

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Key questions to ask an agent when looking for a home to rent Nottingham Estate Agents

Are you looking for your next home to rent? Are you short of time but need to move fast? OnTheMarket.com offers top tips on what to think about. It’s important to ask your estate or letting agent the right questions when you search for a property to rent. “Competition can be fierce and time tight […]

The post Key questions to ask an agent when looking for a home to rent appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.

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Stath Lets Flats star bares all about life as UK’s worst lettings agent

He doesn't hold back...

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Don’t bother with a living wall – plant some ivy

Ivy is a far simpler and more cost-effective way of cloaking buildings in green

The concept of the living wall has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity in recent years. What was once a design novelty at fancy flower shows has gone mainstream, and most major urban developments now seem to have at least part of their surface coated in a matrix of panels filled with growing substrate, allowing plants to colonise their surface. But, much as I love these technological marvels, there’s a far simpler, more cost-effective way to clothe buildings in a living cloak of green: plant some ivy.

Every time I walk past an incredibly complex watering system being installed and scores of workers on cranes hauling huge panels, I think to myself: “None of this is necessary!” Ivy is a cheaper, easier and far less risky option, and provides many of the same environmental and economic benefits as newfangled substrate-filled panels.

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Don’t bother with a living wall – plant some ivy

Ivy is a far simpler and more cost-effective way of cloaking buildings in green

The concept of the living wall has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity in recent years. What was once a design novelty at fancy flower shows has gone mainstream, and most major urban developments now seem to have at least part of their surface coated in a matrix of panels filled with growing substrate, allowing plants to colonise their surface. But, much as I love these technological marvels, there’s a far simpler, more cost-effective way to clothe buildings in a living cloak of green: plant some ivy.

Every time I walk past an incredibly complex watering system being installed and scores of workers on cranes hauling huge panels, I think to myself: “None of this is necessary!” Ivy is a cheaper, easier and far less risky option, and provides many of the same environmental and economic benefits as newfangled substrate-filled panels.

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The rain has hammered the amaranth…

A few dry days and winter sun may hold back the decline. I’ll leave it late to save precious seed

Summer’s been dismantled. Packed away. The plot is hunkering down nearer the ground. Kala’s garden, too, has been half-cleared, now sitting in jugs and drying on shelves. Huge heads of sunflowers, seeds to be shared with friends and family.

I have left the sweet pea structures on the plot, though the flowers are long gone. Two have been colonised by nasturtiums, tendrils reaching hungrily out as though to snare passers-by. The last wigwam is now webbed by an iridescent morning glory, its seed sent to me by a reader. New to me, I will grow them again every year, purple as Prince.

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