Well the fallout from the recent Budget is still continuing. I was chatting to a couple of movers and shakers from the Hounslow area the other day, when one said, “There isn’t enough land to build all these 300,000 houses Philip Hammond wants to build each year”.
Now we have had the autumn budget, Theresa May and Philip Hammond have set out their stall with housing as their key focus. I was glad to see the Government introducing a variety of changes to improve housing, including more funding for the supply side and an injection of urgency into the planning system.
It’s now been a good 18/24 months since annual rental price inflation in Hounslow peaked at 4.3%. Since then we have seen increasingly more humble rent increases. In fact, in certain parts of the Hounslow rental market over the autumn, the rental market saw some slight falls in rents. So, could this be the earliest indication that the trend of high rent increases seen over the last few years, may now be starting to buck that trend?
