The number of tenants evicted by private landlords has increased by 17% since 2007, the beginning of the financial crisis. As opposed to 12,686 possession orders in 2008, this number has gone up to 14,985 by 2011. A possession order is the legal entitlement of a landlord to evict a tenant and take possession of [...]

HM Revenue and Customs have announced plans to crack down on offshore tax evasion and one of the first groups to be targeted will be wealthy individuals who are not paying capital gains tax on foreign property. The 200-strong team of investigators will be collecting data on landlords, holiday home owners and residential property owners [...]

The Ministry of Justice published its response to recent proposals to criminalise squatting in a consultation paper entitled 'Options for dealing with squatting'. The Government has announced that it intends to make the illegal occupation of a residential property a criminal offence. Section 7 of the Criminal Law Acts 1977 already makes it a criminal [...]

A proposed new EU Directive has recently been proposed on mortgages, aiming to deal with the problem of irresponsible lending. If successful, the new regulations could make the property market more stable without drastic booms and busts that were experienced in Ireland and Spain. On the other hand, landlords and estate agents claim that new [...]

Gross mortgage lending rose by 10% in January compared to the same month last year. While mortgage lending at £10.5bn was down by 14% compared to December's total of £12.2bn, January was the sixth consecutive month of increase in year-on-year comparison. According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), gross mortgage lending in 2011 was [...]