Chestertons up for sale in hope of pocketing more than £50m July 2, 2014 LONDON estate agent Chestertons is considering putting the business on the block, as sales volumes of properties in the capital struggle to recover in line with prices. Cavendish Corporate Finance is understood to have been hired a couple of weeks ago to manage the sale process, which is now underway and is expected to fetch [...]
Gimme 5 July 20, 2014 …UPCOMING EVENTS FOR ENTREPRENEURS The Fashion Exchange A day-long event for people starting up in the skincare, beauty and men’s grooming business, with several talks from industry experts. 17 September, 9am – 4pm. £40 BIS, 1 Victoria Street www.enterprisenation.com Marketing Business Surgery A four-hour workshop for businesses in their first 12 months of trading, looking [...]
Post Office to ring changes with EE mobile network tie-up July 7, 2014 The Post Office plans to become a mobile phone provider this autumn, using EE’s network to offer customers “a genuine alternative” to the major carriers. The government-owned company said it planned initially to sell mobile services in 50 Post Office branches, online and over the phone before rolling out across the country later in the year. [...]
Bottom Line: Big banks could steal challengers’ thunder July 23, 2014 EVERYONE hates big banks, right? Wrong. Britons love to complain about their banks, but if you look at actions instead of words, very few of them have done anything about it. It is not difficult for customers to vote with their feet, particularly with the seven-day switching scheme. Those who are unhappy with the service [...]
House prices rise five times faster than expected June 5, 2014 House prices rose by 3.9 per cent in May, according to data from Halifax. Analysts had been expecting prices to rise by just 0.7 per cent this month. IHS Global Insight's Howard Archer says the increase "is a real bolt from the blue and at face value unsettling for policymakers." Values in the three months [...]
Bovis Homes see average selling price soar to £210,000 as completions rise 54pc July 8, 2014 Bovis Homes has seen a 54 per cent rise in completions in the first half of 2014; its highest ever number of completions for the first half of a financial year. According to its latest trading update completions stood at 1,487 for the first six months of 2014, up from 963 in the corresponding period last [...]
London Report: Mortgage lending down but price of houses still rising June 29, 2014 MORTGAGE approval numbers are expected to fall to a 10-month low of 62,000 for May, after the introduction of tough new rules in the Mortgage Market Review (MMR) in April. Howard Archer, of IHS Global Insight, said: “This would be down from 62,918 in April, 66,563 in March and a 74-month high of 75,838 in [...]
London house price boom set to cool down May 28, 2014 LONDON’S housing market is likely to slow down over the summer and return to normal levels of growth in the coming years, Britain’s biggest building society said today. Prices in the capital have shot up by as much as 20 per cent in the last year, but are likely to gradually slow down to increase [...]
Exclusive: RBS is big loser of seven-day switching while Santander wins customers July 22, 2014 RBS is losing the battle for banking customers, City A.M. can reveal, shedding 171,400 customers through the seven-day switching system and gaining just 95,000 current account customers. Overall, RBS and NatWest have lost a net 76,200 through the system since it was launched last September, according to City A.M. calculations based on figures from survey firm [...]
British Gas agrees to pay £1m in compensation in latest mis-selling case to hit the industry July 5, 2014 British Gas will pay £1m in compensation after admitting to misleading customers by making exaggerated promises on its energy bill savings, industry regulator Ofgem has announced. The UK's largest energy supplier mis-sold deals to customers at Sainsbury's supermarkets nationwide and at the Westfield shopping centre in London's Shepherd's Bush in a two year period from [...]