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March Budget - Property and mortgage market

ended 15. March 2023

At 12:30 the Chancellor will be delivering his Budget. If anything is covered relating to the property, mortgage or construction/housing market, please send over your thoughts as soon as possible after, or even during, the Budget speech. Equally, if you think an opportunity has been missed by the Chancellor relating to any aspect of the property market, send your views on that, too. This News Alert will be a live feed shared with national, trade and local media. Please ONLY respond to this alert if you work in the residential/commercial property, construction, housebuilding or mortgage market. Do not respond before the Budget unless you have a crystal ball.

6 responses from the Newspage community

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Riz MalikVerified
Independent Financial Adviser at R3 Wealth
Rather than devising a quantum strategy, it would be great to have a housing strategy. The Chancellor must have left part of his speech at number 11 Downing Street. Even potholes got more of a mention. The Chancellor is more concerned with filling in holes in the ground rather than building on it. I'm sure first-time buyers struggling to get on the ladder or people worried about their mortgages will take consolation in the fact we will be investing in a £900m supercomputer. The Government is handing Labour the keys to Number 10 on a plate. The saving grace is that increasing childcare provisions for every child over 9 months will potentially help with mortgage affordability.
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Justin MoyVerified
Managing Director at EHF Mortgages
There was little to interest the mortgage holders and landlords this time, hopefully this is not being kept back for another day! The increase in corporation tax will affect those with Limited Company Buy to let portfolios, given their recent popularity that will bring in some additional income, but that may be balanced off with the higher interest costs?! That Corporation Tax increase will negatively impact company owners who are using their profit for mortgage borrowing, and it may encourage more people to increase salaries (rather than dividends), so the self-employed mortgage market will have some changes in affordabilty.
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Ross BoydVerified
CEO at Dashly.com
“Many have called on the Chancellor to do something to boost the housing market. This could be a relaxation of stamp duty, providing more support to those with increasing mortgages or even a promise to keep the interest rate at the current level. We don’t want a situation of overinflated house prices so any initiatives here need to be carefully managed, but the reality is that if something doesn’t change soon, we will see a wider shortage in supply and demand which could be detrimental to property prices.

“Uncertainty in the market has left many potential buyers sitting on their hands waiting to see what happens next. This subsequently ground the property market to a halt. But it doesn’t matter which side of the coin you’re on, the housing market needs some help to boost purchases and get transactions moving again.”
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Graham CoxVerified
Director at Bridging Hub
The childcare reforms will help massively to get people back into work after maternity leave. This in turn will make it easier to buy a property so that's very welcome. What's not so welcome is the ominous silence on house building. Probably because they know house builders won't build anywhere near the number of property needed whilst house prices are falling. Nothing on social housing either, which is what's desperately needed to supplement the private rented sector.
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Luke Thompson0
Director at PAB Wealth Management
The OBR forecasts in relation to inflation do seem encouraging at first glance with inflation predicted to fall much closer to the Bank of England's target towards the end of this year this may enable them to start using interest rate decreases as a way to help get the economy moving at the start of 2024 which would help with those whose incomes are stretched at the minute.

However, these predictions have been wildly incorrect in the recent past so it is important for people not to think that we are out of the woods with high inflation yet.
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Dean EsnardVerified
Director at Magni Finance
The expectation that inflation will fall to 2.9% by the end of the year is the most important information from the budget. This will undoubtedly give the Bank of England confidence that the base rate increases have worked and hopefully the end is in sight. All eyes will now be on the monetary policy committee meeting next Thursday where we will really find out where we stand.