We Introduce You

On a no news day for Secured Loans, a nationally circulated story has just caught my eye. It caught my attention for two reasons, firstly because it talks about empty houses and our business obviously has a vested interest in property ownership and secondly, because it highlights two places near to where I live as the worst cases.

Halifax research shows a total of 290,862 private homes in England have been left empty for more than six months - equivalent to 1.6% of all privately owned dwellings in England. Although they also add that the number of private empty homes has fallen by 6% in England over the past three years.

The most private empty homes are in Burnley (6.2%), Liverpool (5.6%) and Pendle (5.1%).

Now, I live in Pendle and the neighbouring Borough is Burnley - so that’s two places I know a little bit about and I wonder whether the empty houses are because of them being ‘low demand’, being marked for demolition or maybe it’s because of some sort of fall-out from the, do we - don’t we demolish them or renovate them debacle of a few years ago.

In contrast to the Halifax figure the Empty Homes Campaign estimates the figure to be nearer to 700,000 and according to the Government’s figures we will need another 4 million new homes within the next 10 years. My quick trawl around the Internet also reveals that 200 Councils have an Empty Property Office.

With regards to houses standing empty for a long time, perhaps we should take a leaf out of our American cousin’s book and paint them orange to draw more attention to them.

The OFT transferring PPI to the Competition Commission could be seen as getting rid of a Hot Potato - but it was a struggle to find a picture of a potato that looked “Hot”

I’ve had a first glance at the OFT’s report into the Payment Protection Insurance Market and its subsequent transfer to the Competition Commission and it’s quite an eye opener. One of the most shocking things was when they reported finding a loan with a headline APR of 5%, but when you added in the PPI cost, the true APR came out at a whopping 13%! I’ve often written about this subject and always had the view that it was unfair to consumers that the APR didn’t include the PPI cost and it’s always presented a loophole for the less scrupulous loan dealers to exploit.

I’ll be posting more about PPI as the story unfolds, but in the mean time, I’ve extracted the points relevant to the secured loans market and created a second OFT/PPI page. The page includes an ‘Executive Summary’ and is well worth a read if you don’t get time to read the whole thing.

Perhaps this is a solution to the finding a Hot Potato image problem

The OFT has announced today that it is referring the Payment Protection Market (PPI) to the Competition Commission and rather than prattle on about it in an incoherent manner, I’d prefer to appraise the situation prior to doing a more detailed post about it later.

At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be any new findings in the press release, but it’s interesting to note the comments of the OFT’s Chief Executive John Fingleton ‘Following the work we have undertaken it is clear that many consumers are failed by PPI - insurance which gives them a poor deal and often less protection than they think. There is limited evidence the industry is taking steps to improve the situation, but we believe they will not make major improvements to competition in the market. Given our evidence and the scale of this market, our provisional view is that it would be appropriate for the Competition Commission to investigate further.’

At some stage I’ll also update the page OFT report on PPI to include sections relevant to the secured loans market.