This Week in Property: The Latest News (7th January 2022)

Take a look at what our CEO Gill Fielding has to say about this week’s property news…

First timers flourish

There have been some really negative events over the last year or so but one big positive to come out of the pandemic is the number of first time buyers who have been able to get onto the property ladder. Apparently 408,379 people bought a property for the first time in 2021 (source: Yorkshire Building Society) which is 35% higher than in 2020 and the highest number since 2002. Despite the fact that property prices rise significantly during the year the availability of cheap finance and the accumulation of savings during lockdown has enabled many people to buy when previously a property purchase was not possible. I wanted to mention it because it just shows that for those 408,379 people the pandemic has resulted in a really positive outcome and for them the lockdown has given them an opportunity that they wouldn’t normally have had. It’s important to hang onto the thought that even in times of difficulty there is always a way out if you concentrate on your own personal circumstances rather than the national ones. Concentrate on your private economy and take responsibility, control and action rather than being held back by the public economy which you can do nothing about!

…and what does the Bank of England print?

The Bank of England has just finished its quantitative easing programme where – some would say – they just printed £895 billion of money to pump into the UK economy. That money was mainly used to buy government bonds with the intention of holding down borrowing costs and that initiative ended at the end of 2021. And now they’ve finished printing money the Bank of England has decided to print a book called: ‘Can’t we just print more money?’ which is meant to be a pop-economics book explaining some of the fundamental principles of the economy such as quantitative easing, inflation and debt. Now the book isn’t out until May so I can’t review it for you but whatever it says it must be a help and an improvement on the information they’ve published so far.  Sadly financial information is so poor and difficult to understand that it puts most people off when fundamentally the principles behind that information are relatively simple and could be taught in schools. We’ve never done that before but we can start now and I hope this new book is so good that we want to give it to every young person in the UK and then they can start making better financial decisions for their long term financial stability. Well done Bank of England!

How big is the apple?

I have to mention that this week Apple has become the first company to reach the value of $3 trillion which in layman’s terms is a million, million dollars. That’s an extraordinary amount of money and an extraordinary rate of growth starting with their stock market listing in 1980. Apparently it took them 9,491 days to reach one trillion, 516 to go from $1 trillion to $2 trillion and only 345 days to go from $2 trillion to $3 trillion. Although this size is something that us mere mortals can’t really comprehend their business growth strategy is one us smaller entrepreneurs can copy because it’s a basic ‘core and explore’ strategy. So they started with a core product, the i-phone and then explored other opportunities close to that: the i-pad, computers, the i-cloud and entertainment subscription services. Now they’re talking about reality glasses so they continue to explore and expand from their central core offering. It’s simple and clever and what we can all do. The strategy can be the same even if our corporate value is nearer to $3k rather than $3 trillion!

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