Real Estate

Bloomberg Boris Johnson’s government will invest nearly $1.7 billion in building projects and provide two billion pounds in energy efficiency grants in an effort to create jobs and rally the pandemic-hit UK economy. Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said 300 “shovel-ready” projects will receive a share of a 900 million pound Getting Building Fund, and a further 360 million pounds will ...

Dubai / WAM The Dubai Real Estate Institute (DREI) in Dubai Land Department (DLD) is organising the first virtual real estate conference titled ‘Real Estate post-Covid-19 – Challenges and Solutions,’ in cooperation with a number of entities in Saudi Arabia. The conference, which will be held on August 23-24, will witness the participation of a group of real estate speakers ...

DUBAI / WAM Master developer Nakheel has announced that it sold almost 250 properties with a total sales value of over AED600 million in the last four months, with ready-to-occupy villas most in demand. Among the most popular are Nakheel’s family villas at Nad Al Sheba, where a third phase of ready-to-move-into properties has just been released, after phases one ...

Bloomberg The landlords of as many as 40 Travelodge hotels are planning to replace them with a serviced apartment operator following a bitter row with the budget hotel chain over rent cuts, according to the Daily Telegraph. Various unnamed landlords are in discussions with Room2, which wants to launch a low-cost version of its “hometel” concept, which combines serviced apartments ...

Bloomberg UK house prices have slipped for a fourth month in June as the country started to emerge from lockdown. Average house prices fell 0.1% to an average of $300,000, Halifax said, the longest run of declines in a decade. From a year earlier, prices gained 2.5%. New mortgage inquiries rose 100% on the month. Britain is slowly lifting the ...

Bloomberg The scale of Boris Johnson’s challenge to revive the UK economy was laid bare on Wednesday as house prices posted their first annual decline since 2012 and firms reported a record slump in sales. The prime minister has unveiled part of his plan for boosting the UK’s recovery, reconfirming his commitment to long-term investment in some of the country’s ...

Bloomberg UK house prices increased as lockdown measures that froze the market were relaxed, Rightmove Plc said. Asking prices in June were 1.9% higher compared to March, before the market was put on hold, the property website operator said on Monday, bringing average values to $424,000. Restrictions put in place to slow the outbreak of the coronavirus were eased in ...

Bloomberg Germany’s construction minister, Horst Seehofer, wants to help protect tenants by making it more difficult to convert rental apartments into condominiums, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported. Seehofer is proposing to introduce a threshold of at least two-thirds of the flats in an apartment building having to be sold to tenants or their family members for any conversion plan to gain ...

Bloomberg Canada’s federal housing agency is considering scaling back mortgage underwriting practices to limit excessive borrowing due to the threat of significant declines in real estate prices and rising debt levels. The combination of higher mortgage debt, declining property prices and increased unemployment is “cause for concern for Canada’s longer-term financial stability,” Evan Siddall, chief executive officer at Canada Mortgage ...

Bloomberg One of the UK’s biggest real-estate managers is predicting gloomy times ahead for bricks and mortar. Insurance giant Aviva Plc expects residential property prices to drop 12% and commercial real estate to decline by 15% because of the impact of the pandemic, it said in an earnings update on Thursday. On a slightly brighter note, it sees long-term growth ...