‘Van homes’ aren’t romantic – they are proof of our horrifying housing crisis

More than 21,000 people applied to convert their vehicles into dwellings in the past year. This is why we need 21st-century council housing

Finally, an ingenious solution to a housing crisis that is sapping the quality of life of an entire generation: the humble van. More than 21,000 Britons applied to the DVLA in the past year – a rise of almost two-thirds in two years – to convert their van into a home. These can be furnished to include a shower, a bed, cooking facilities and a seating area. Apparently, some van homes even have hot tubs. With your cosy cubby-hole on wheels, you can escape the tyranny of a private rental sector defined by rip-off rents and a lack of security and roam the British landscape, unshackled, free!

Stop this – stop this immediately. This is yet another attempt to glamorise a national scandal, to dress up desperation at the inability of a wealthy society to provide one of the most basic needs of its citizens as kooky and fun. Will historians look back at this as a wacky, innovative trend, or will they write: “In 2019, citizens of the country with the sixth-biggest economy were forced to transform vehicles into places to live because of the lack of affordable housing”?

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Landlords plan to reduce portfolios in spite of record asking rents

Read the full story here.

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Explore the Georgian home for sale on the River Thames

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Serious buyers and sellers lead to lowest fall throughs since 2015

It's good news for serious movers.

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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 […]

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