Hey everyone, Rob B here with Rob D and you are listening to the market update on the

property podcast. This week we've got insights on rate changes, we cover the mortgage market,

interested news around rents, the now and the future, and we bring you a big news story

on ground rents. All that and more in this week's episode.

Welcome to the property podcast.

If you don't know by now, we run a business that buys more than £100 million worth of property every single year for our clients.

You can find out about that at property hub.net slash invest.

And we and our team, of course, are always staying close to the news, always keeping an eye on what's going on with house prices and rents and trends and legislation and all the rest of it. And so you don't have to do all that, we're going to round it up for you right now. Okay, let's get straight into our market update, bring you up to say with everything that's happened in the world of property over the last month. And we'll start, Rob, as we often do, big picture. And the big economic news of the last week or so has been the Bank of England's latest interest rate decision. So, on the face of it, not that exciting because they're held rates where they are. But it was close. It was really close. And I think that's the news story here. That's the big point of this, is how close it was. For those who don't follow these things as closely as us, there's a committee and they vote and there's nine of them, so you have to have a majority

vote for a rate cut or rise. And it was five to four in favor of holding for voting to cut.

Now that is as close as it could get. So I think it's reasonable to expect a rate cut very, very soon. I would

be surprised, Rob, if we didn't cut next month, especially on the latest inflation news that we've had,

that it's predicted to hit its 2% target by spring this year. I actually can't remember,

Rob, the last time it hit its target of 2%. We are going back many, many years.

But even without hitting target, we've been on a cutting spree of rates.

So if we actually hit the target, the rates could come down quite significantly.

And what we predicted and what the market's been forecasting so far, that could start to

shift.

We could see significant rate cuts.

Now, I don't think they're going to go crazy. They're not reckless. That's, you know, that's kind of their job to be sensible of these things. But that's a big event. If we actually hit target

for the first time in many, many years, I think it's fair and reasonable to expect that rates will

start to fall further. I think that's a reasonable expectation. expect that rates will start to fall further.

I think that's a reasonable expectation. And that, of course, is supportive of higher house prices,

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