Helen Crane

landlords feel they can obviously bidding wars will be banned but they'll kind of feel they can put it on at a higher price because they have more people looking and it's more likely they'll find someone who'll who'll pay that price also we're already hearing about landlords who've put rents up just before this act came in

to kind of shield themselves from any costs that they end up having to foot because of it.

So I think great for security.

I think it's brought tenants some rights that they badly need, but also more flexibility when they need it.

I think not being locked into a fixed term tenancy, if you don't want to be, can be a good thing if your sort of circumstances change.

But I think the thing that I'm worried about is that it will end up in the long term costing tenants more in the form of higher rents.

So I think it is looking like, at least if you believe sort of traders' expectations, is that there will be interest rate rises to come later this year, possibly the next decision will be a rise, which is obviously bad news, as Simon said, for anyone with a mortgage.

Although we have seen lenders cutting rates in the last couple of weeks.

So as mortgage lenders tend to do, as soon as Iran...

kicked off they put up their rates quite rapidly you know they tend to kind of rush in and then they come down more slowly but they are coming down gradually still about a percent higher than they were at the start of March but falling slightly I think in terms of what to do

Simon was talking about this confidence trick of making people you know feel like they need to sort of squirrel money away where they can and sort of be sensible with their finances and and I think in a way that that confidence trick has worked so something that I noticed this morning they had the nationwide house price index out and prices have gone up by three percent in the year to April which is more than probably expected given everything that's gone on even though that obviously only reflects the first sort of month of the conflict um

But one of the reasons that their chief economist said that house prices have been able to go up is because basically people have been really sensible with their finances.

You know, this is obviously sort of wealthier people where they've been able to.

But people's household debt is lower than it's been for years.

People have quite a lot of money in savings.

And that's kind of given them that confidence to still...

You know, buy a property, even if they have to take a slightly more expensive mortgage, because after everything that's happened over the last years, they've kind of built this buffer.

And I do think, again, you know, the cost of living has been really hard on a lot of people.

And there are people that aren't able to do that, of course.

But I think if the last few years has taught kind of comfortably off people anything, it's having some kind of buffer, if you can, makes it feel like you can sort of smooth over a lot of these crazy ups and downs that we now seem to see all the time.