Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley, the global financial service firm, has successfully taken over an office building worth €165m previously owned by corporate lawyer Brian O’ Donnell and his psychiatrist wife, Dr Mary Patricia O’Donnell after the couple failed to repay the loan that was taken out for the said building.The property is located in London’s prestigious Canary Wharf financial district.

This latest woe definitely comes as a blow to the couple who are currently embroiled in a controversial effort in handing over their 3 properties worth €360m to their four children.

The high-profile couple have been locked in a tense court battle with Bank of Ireland over a €75m debt, during which it was revealed they had transferred properties to their four children and has left the Bank of Ireland spending countless of hours this week in a bid to untangle ownership of the O’Donnells’ property empire which was once worth a massive €1bn.

Morgan Stanley successfully secured it’s takeover bid after appointing it’s mortgage servicing division as a “special servicer” under a securitisation agreement through which the loan was sold on to institutions and investors.

The O’Donnells London empire portfolio consists of – a second Canary Wharf skyscraper and a luxurious five-storey house on Barton Street in Westminster, close to London landmarks Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.

Mortgage Statement

Responding to today’s announcement that the temporary first-time buyer stamp duty concession will end on 24 March 2012 as planned, CML director general Paul Smee said: “It is disappointing to see the government withdrawing the stamp duty concession that currently benefits first-time buyers.

“While the concession may not have stimulated additional demand, it was a significant help to home-owners entering the market and its removal runs counter to the themes of the new housing strategy.

“It is likely that we will see a bunching of eligible first-time buyer transactions early next March to beat the expiry date on the concession.”

Wendy Evans-Scott, president of the National Association of Estate Agents, agrees. She said: “We were disappointed to see that the first-time buyer holiday for Stamp Duty Land Tax is not being extended beyond March 2012.

“As such, today’s Autumn Statement fails to provide much comfort to the property market. First-time buyers are the lifeblood of the property market, and our recent data shows the number of first-time buyers getting on to the housing ladder has reached a three-year low.

“With the stamp duty holiday disappearing from next March, the Government will need to do more to help the fragile first-time buyer market.”

Grenville Turner, chief executive of Countrywide, said: “At a time where deposit affordability remains a significant barrier to not only first-time buyers, it is disappointing that the Chancellor did not take the opportunity to extend the Stamp Duty holiday for first-time buyers and has instead added another barrier for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder.

“A positive antidote to assist the vast majority of homemovers and the resale market would have been a Stamp Duty holiday for all homebuyers up to £250,000

“Whilst the measures announced in the Government’s housing strategy are a step in the right direction, they only scratch the surface of the fundamental issues that have restricted the housing market in recent years – housing supply and the high level of deposits required.

“The prediction that 100,000 families will benefit from the Mortgage Indemnity Scheme may be optimistic, as we are yet to hear the detail of whether it enables lenders to offer cheaper rates.”

Ben Thompson, managing director of the Legal & General Mortgage Club, said: “It is disappointing that the Government did not consider relaxing the prohibitive strain of stamp duty as this may be a way of kick starting movement in a largely stagnant section of the housing market.

“Whilst the Government is obviously limited in its ability to offer huge tax giveaways as the public coffers stand largely empty such a move may have ended up proving beneficial as it would grease the wheels of what has become a vitally important part of the UK economy.

Best Mortgage Rates

Homebuyers looking to secure the cheapest mortgage rate should head over to mortgages.co.uk for information, news and guides on mortgages, including remortgages.

The recently relaunched site also features a mortgage calculator for an easy way to find out the true cost of a mortgage.

From first time buyers looking to get their first property and pondering the prospect of shared ownership, to landlords after the best buy to let mortgages, there is information for every situation featured on mortgages.co.uk. Every day the site carries the latest news, views and features on the mortgage market.

Alidad Moghaddam, Head of We Know Money, said: “The housing market has been stagnant for a while now, house prices are even falling in many parts of the country prompting many people to wonder what is going on.

Those looking for answers should visit on mortgages.co.uk where all the latest news on house prices, mortgages rates and new products can be found.”

Liz Phillips, Editor of We Know Money said: “Mortgages.co.uk has a wealth of information written from an unbiased and informed viewpoint by experienced financial journalists.

With fixed mortgage rates recently hitting record lows, homeowners may think now is a good time to lock-in. However, with the base rate remaining at 0.5% those on a tracker mortgage are also getting an extremely good deal.

It’s a tricky choice for many people, if you are wondering what to do, visit the site to help you make a decision.”

Home Ownership

It would be funny if it were not so terrible. Britain is 30 years into the grand Conservative project that was to transform the nation into a “property-owning democracy”. To mark this great anniversary, a government-sponsored organisation, UK Asset Resolution, is about to embark on the highly patronising and paternalistic task of telephoning 30,000 mortgage-holders and telling them to spend less on nights out, Sky television, gym membership and mobile phones, and more on servicing their mortgages. It’s safe to say that this is not what Margaret Thatcher had in mind when she promised that her privatisation policies would remove the state from people’s personal lives. It hardly chimes with David Cameron’s rhetoric either.

UK Asset Resolution. What a name. It sounds like a highly dodgy private company that buys debt, then intimidates people into paying it off at extortionate rates. But it isn’t. UK Asset Resolution is the Treasury-owned holding company that was established last October to “support around 800,000 customers with £77bn of loans”, customers who initially took out their mortgages with Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. Both of those companies, of course, are now “taxpayer owned”, after receiving more than £48.7bn in government loans.

Essentially, all these 800,000 people live in houses that are owned by the government, and have to pay the government every month if they wish to carry on living in them. Some of them – the riskier propositions – will also have to put up with presumptive lectures from strangers about their frivolous failure to understand their financial priorities. And they are not the only vulnerable “home owners” by any means. It is Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, not Northern Rock and B&B, that have the greatest exposure to customers whose mortgages are already larger than the value of their homes.

You’d imagine that the implosion of the “property-owning democracy” project was obvious to all. You’d have imagined that it had become obvious back in 1997, when highly visible homelessness was one of the factors that delivered a landslide election victory to Tony Blair. But no.

Just to underline this historic failure, the National Housing Federation this week predicted that the proportion of the population who own or live with the owner of their home will fall to 63.8% by 2021, about the level it stood at in the 1980s. Of more immediate concern are the observations from homelessness charity Crisis that rough sleeping is up 8% on last year, while the number of people accepted as homeless by local councils and placed in social housing is up by 10%. Since the coalition came to power, the number of families claiming housing benefit has risen by 150,000. There are now five million names on waiting lists for social housing. Many more don’t bother to make an application, because they understand that they have absolutely no chance of becoming a council or housing association tenant.

The most astounding thing about this mess is that there is still a widespread failure to understand that a flagship ideological experiment in self-regulation by the market is in tatters. The deregulation of banks and building societies, combined with draconian restrictions on the provision of new council housing, which could have replaced stock diminished by the right to buy, was supposed to transform “sink estates” into privately owned and lovingly cared-for communities. Instead, the social demographic of people living in council flats has narrowed massively. The people with the greatest problems are herded together, sometimes seeking a dark kind of identity in their blighted postcode, to the point at which the threat of eviction from council housing is seriously touted as a way of encouraging people to think twice before they take part in riots. God help us.

Yet even though the property-owning democracy idea has achieved neither its social nor its financial goals (the housing market has manifestly not developed in an orderly fashion that seamlessly matches supply and demand), there remains a truculent insistence from the right that somehow it is still interference from the state that is the problem, rather than the lack of it. That is at the heart of Cameron’s wish to delay the enactment of recommendations whereby banks separate their retail operations from their investment arms. Not for the first time in recent decades, we see a British prime minister who is very keen on “liberal democracy” when he is “exporting” it, but much more keen on oligarchy when he is dealing with matters at home.

Capitalism is pretty simple. Those with the capital get the profits because they are the ones who have money to invest. The very fact that 30 years of financial deregulation has resulted in greater division between rich and poor is prima facie evidence that capitalism has been working extremely dynamically, unhindered by the state’s supposedly crushing interference, until the bursting of the asset bubbles that it created. Chief among these, of course, was the property bubble, which in turn fuelled the febrile consumer boom that continues to worry the 2,400 employees of UK Asset Resolution so greatly.

Yet, still there remains in place an obstinate refusal to see that, without a determinedly redistributive infrastructure, liberal democracy simply cannot exist.

Britain has now been an oligarchy, not a democracy, for quite some time. It is utterly absurd that Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne are at odds with their coalition partners over this question of reorganising the banks, and instead are minded to give greater weight to the desires of the banks themselves, who are resisting the plan.

Basically, the reform calls for the ordinary money of ordinary people, who earn it, to be looked after with more caution and respect than the extraordinary money of people looking for speculative returns that will provide unearned income. After the hammering that ordinary people have been asked to take, in consequence of the financial crash, it is perverse and repulsive that this pair can even imagine that they have a mandate to shield the banks from a restructuring prompted by their own cavalier and foolhardy negligence. It’s an appalling affront to democracy, property-owning or not.

Source - Google Images

At least 30,000 customers of Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock will begin to receive phone calls within the coming months as part of an attempt in advising them to change their spending ways or risk repossession as interest rates is set to rise.

According to UK’s Asset Resolution (UKAR), the body responsible for running £80bn of mortgages bailed out by the taxpayer, is identifying customers who could get into trouble in an attempt to persuade them to change their behaviour now.

UKAR’s chief executive Richard Banks said that some people won’t cope when interest rates rise, but for others there are remedies,” he said. They need to think about what is their most important debt. It’s not the credit card, or renewing their Sky subscription, or going out for the latest mobile technology, it’s their mortgage. They have been protected by low interest rates, but the consensus is that rates will start to rise late next year. We are taking a much more pro-active stance,” he said. He added that the UK is yet to see the impact of the public sector cuts which will come in over the next few months.

Though 90% of UKAR’s customers have been paying on time, Mr Banks is keen on helping out the 10% who are curently trying to make ends meet. A good indicator of those who may have trouble in the future is a change to or cancellation of the mortgage direct debit in an attempt to juggle finances.

Besides their pilot project, UKAR is also conducting checks with credit agencies to see when customers are getting into trouble with other debts. At both Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock Asset Management we are running a pilot and are phoning customers and asking them how things are going,” said Mr Banks.

We are also asking them what their plans are for when interest rates go up. Repossession is the last option for us. We want customers to look at their finances and change their behaviour.

UKAR plans to phone up at least 2,000 customers a week to prepare them for the shock when rates start to rise. The general view is that rates will start to increase steadily over a two to three-year period by half a per cent each time. Rates could stabilise at 4% to 5%, which could add hundreds of pounds to customers’ monthly mortgage payments. Mr Banks said there is also a significant chance of a double-dip recession when rates start to increase.

Mr Banks revealed that in some cases lenders have been too soft with customers who are in trouble and that by granting a customer more time it can actually increase their indebtedness. That’s not being fair to them,” he said.

He noted that UKAR has seen a small increase in repossessions, but arrears have stabilised and over the past three months it has seen a small decline.

The number of customers more than six months in arrears at the end of May was 23,288. The equivalent number at the end of July was 22,372, a reduction of 916 accounts. This reflects two activities. First, some customers are moving into repossession, which is why UKAR has seen a small increase in repossessions. Second some customers have managed to reduce their arrears position and have moved back into less than six months in arrears.

Following new research by influential ratings agency Standard & Poor’s that found homeowners in the North are 35 per cent more likely to fall into arrears than borrowers in the South, Mr Banks said UKAR has also seen a North-South split.

The Yorkshire Post has been highlighting the divide in economic fortunes in its Fair Deal campaign. There is a very distinctive ‘red belt’ in the North compared to London and the South East, he said.

Last month UKAR warned that higher fuel bills, surging food prices and unemployment could lead to a rise in its bad debts.

Source - SXC.hu

The last few days have shown us the rise and fall of civilisation. London witnessed one of its worst riots known to date. Looting, fights and so on were widespread all over London.

Though the police are all out to bring those responsible to the face of justice, the damage however, has been done. With the economy as it is, rebuilding London and the effected areas is easier said than done. When the dust has settled and things return to the way it was, one thing is for sure, banks and insurance agencies are in for a major headache.

For all those who have taken precautionary measures in insuring their properties, be it cars,houses,business building, this is the time where they will be able to “reap what they have sown”.

With that said, not everything is rosy as reports have emerged that Britain’s banking giants were refusing to help the innocent victims of the riots. Apparently, the residents of the Carpetright building in Tottenham, North London, and the flats above the shop are expected to still pay their mortgage.

Bill Payne, who runs the Metropolitan Housing Partnership, which operates the 26 shared ownership flats in the block states that the country came to the assistance of the banks when the industry was collapsing. It does not leave a pleasant taste in the mouth that they won’t come to our help now. I think their behaviour is hard-nosed, insensitive and immoral.

Mr Payne goes on to say that most of the victims have called their banks to ask to be let off paying their mortgage for a month or two to give them some breathing space and many have been refused, a response that he found staggering given the terrible trauma which they have suffered.

However, unlike those banks who are refusing to help out, Mr Payne said he had immediately decided to waive all the rent which the residents of the block, River Heights, were due to pay him. He is also paying their hotel bills, and doing everything else possible to assist the residents, who include families with young children. He said: ‘They are calling the banks to say, “My home has been burned to the ground” and the bank just says, “You’ve got to keep paying your mortgage. It is up to you to pay.

However not all banks are turning a deaf ear to the cries of their customers as some residents have been more fortunate, with their bank immediately offering to help. A spokesmen for Barclay stated that they are dealing with it on a case by case basis, and we are obviously being sympathetic.

Meanwhile, its not just the locals who were affected. Celebrated Chef Jamie Oliver was also a victim as one of his restaurants was attacked by rioters. Even one of Notting Hill’s most upmarket restaurants was also pillaged by rioters while diners were still dining.

Are you a Landlord? Looking for opportunities to add new properties to your portfolio?

If you are, then Buy To Let remortgage provides the opportunity to do so. Even for those who are planning on entering the Buy To Let market scene, a remortgage could prove beneficial for them.

With the current rates for remortgages being offered at lower levels and lending criteria’s easing up makes it a great opportunity for those who are interested to get into the Buy To Let market plus, with the rise in the market for rented properties, the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

Buy To Let is proving to be the latest trend in acquiring a steady and fixed income as reports suggest that more and more owners are turning their properties into Buy To Let properties.

The latest data from LSL Buy To Let property Index shows that the cost of rental prices had increased by 0.7 per cent in June which makes the average rent now at £701. This brings the average rental cost to a new record high after five straight months of rental cost increases. With that stated, the Buy To Let market is set to bloom even more in the coming months.

According to David Newnes from LSL Property Services, he stated that in areas like London where competition for rental property is most intense, it’s not unheard of for rental properties to be let within a day of coming on to the market.

The reason why the switch is being made by most home owners or prospective home owners is due to the fact that demand for rental properties has increased as buyers are being shut out of home ownership due to tight lending practices. Few of the households wanting to purchase can afford the high deposits required or obtain approval in such a weak economy. This is forcing many to rent and abandon the immediate hope of home ownership. Lenders are complying with the high demand for rental property by bringing many Buy To Let products to the market for landlords. Remortgage Buy To lets are among those and are at some of the lowest levels seen all year.

The research came as three large mortgage companies, Britannia and Yorkshire Building Society, announced that they were putting up their rates for new customers from next week.

Royal Bank of Scotland, which has received more than £50 billion of taxpayers’ money, is putting up its two year deal, for those with a 20 per cent deposit, from 5.09 per cent to 5.79 per cent.

According to figures from the personal finance publisher, MoneyFacts, the average two-year fixed rate mortgage, still the most popular deal, was 4.87 per cent at the start of March, just before the Bank cut bank rate from 1 per cent to 0.5 per cent.

After that cut rates started to tick down and fell to 4.60 per cent in April, but since then have started to creep back up and yesterday were ate 4.62 per cent. They are likely to climb higher once the latest increases are taken into account.

Ray Boulger, a mortgage expert with broker John Charcol said that the profits lenders were making from home loans were now “the highest for a very long time”, with banks and building societies putting up their rates to protect their profits ahead of the expected surge in repossessions later this year.

“Before the credit crunch many mortgages were loss leaders for lenders but now the boot is on the other foot. The gross [profit] margins are the highest for a very long time,” he said.

The hardest hit are first time buyers. Those who have just a 10 per cent deposit – the case for most people trying to get on the housing ladder – have seen rates drop from 6.38 per cent to 5.97 per cent before climbing back up to 6.13 per cent.

The concern is that fragile signs of a potential recovery in the housing market could be squashed if first time buyers are shut out altogether from buying a property.

In recent weeks, the Land Registry has suggested the precipitous fall in house prices is slowing down, while the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has reported that the number of potential house buyers has increased for the five consecutive months.

Nicholas Leeming, an estate agent and founder of website propertyfinder.com, said: “We are definitely seeing a pick up in activity, but it is being constrained by the availability of finance for buyers, especially those with small deposits.”

Melanie Bien, director at mortgage broker Savills, said: “It is hugely disappointing that rates are climbing back up. It is going to a while before first time buyers are able to afford anything.”