The Hertfordshire village of Wheathampstead has been included in The Sunday Times Best Places to Live list for 2023, published on March 25th. Situated just a few miles north of St Albans, Wheathampstead has been listed among the best eleven locations in the south-east, as well as one of the top 72 places in the…
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Property and Conveyancing


The latest Wealth and Assets Survey carried out on behalf of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) claims that gifts and informal loans from family members have further skewed the pattern of home ownership in the UK. Between 2018 and 2020 annually funds and assets worth £17 billion were passed between family members, an increase…
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Jeremy Henderson, a south-London accountant, has been hit with a huge legal bill after selling his former home knowing (but not disclosing) that part of the garden was infested with Japanese knotweed. The former owner sold the property in Raynes Park to furniture designer Jonathan Downing for £700,000 in August, 2018. After buying the three-bedroom…
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In the hectic few days before Christmas many of us will have missed this positive bit of news for the residential housing market. On 20th December the government announced that the Mortgage Guarantee Scheme will be extended for another 12 months until the end of December this year, instead of finishing on December 31st 2022…
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It’s easy for first time buyers to be confused and intimidated by the property buying process. First-timers buyers will naturally feel nervous, after all buying property is likely to be the biggest expense and financial commitment of their lives and such decisions should not be taken lightly. Many of the terms used in property buying…
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Amid all the gloomy talk about the cost of borrowing, the withdrawal of cheap mortgage deals, and the general state of the economy, we should remember that even in times of recession there are always people who need to buy and sell property. There may be many reasons for this – the death of a…
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Successive governments have introduced a number of incentives to assist first-time buyers in getting a foothold onto the housing ladder. Here we provide a summary of the schemes that are available at the time of writing and more information can be found on the Buying and Owning a Property Section of the government website. Current…
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Changes to capital gains tax (CGT) next spring will lead to a fall in property prices and force many buy-to-let owners to sell up, according to property market experts. Included in the government’s recent autumn statement were plans to cut the capital gains tax allowance from £12,300 to £6000 in April next year, followed by…
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The Planning Committee of St Albans council has rejected proposals for the building of nearly 400 new homes on green belt land at Chiswell Green, between St Albans and Watford. The Committee rejected the planning application by eight votes to one at a meeting on November 27th, claiming that the scheme would contravene the St…
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One of the irritations of modern life is the need to provide ever-greater levels of security when opening accounts or making transactions online and by telephone. The intention is supposedly to make banking and money transfers easier for the customer, but the unintended consequence of this is that it may also make it easier for…
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