Will There Be an Election? Burnham, Bond Markets & UK Mortgage Rates │ Propenomix Live

Speaker A: Monday, AI agents took over my work.

Speaker B: Uh, and I absolutely love it.

Speaker A: Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind. Now they live inside Monday.com, so they see the full picture. My work, my team, the whole company. And I don't have to worry about the data. It's safe, which means I'm free to focus on the big stuff. Knowing everything runs smoothly in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes

Speaker C: on Monday.com Summer is here at Orderly Meds, we know this time is a reminder that life is full of new beginnings. Whether you're celebrating the nice weather, starting a new chapter, planning a vacation, or simply looking ahead to what's next, this season can be the perfect time to invest in yourself and your health. If you've struggled with weight loss and are curious about GLP1 medications, orderly meds can help you learn about your options. Through a simple virtual process, you can connect with licensed medical professionals who can determine whether treatment may be appropriate for you. Getting started is fast, convenient, and happens online from the comfort of home. This summer, consider a new approach to feeling your best. Visit orderlymeds.com podcast to learn more. That's orderlymeds.com podcast orderlymeds.com podcast because every new season is an opportunity to take the next step forward, compounded medications are not FDA approved, eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details.

Speaker B: Supplement writes up but also with a bit of extra juice this week because things are moving so very quickly that ultimately we've got to try and stay on top of these things. And as soon as this video comes out in 24 hours, some of the content and it will be out of date. That's the way we are at the moment, while the political landscape is moving as quickly as it is. And we've got to try and get on top of all of this, let's face it, right? So we are where we are. What's happened in the past week? Well, we know we can frame this by, uh, Keir Starmer is gone. Um, he resigned early on Monday morning. Um, the lectern was wheeled out of Downing street once again, that sad little picture. And then he finally got emotional talking about his wife and kids. Probably seen a bit of the real Kia Starmer there. I've got to be honest with you, I found it very strange and really quite frustrating where there was some chat when he was made PM about enjoying his weekends and making time for all of this sort of stuff. I love my family, I love my work, life, balance, don't get me wrong. But when you're the Prime Minister, there just isn't room for any of that, I'm afraid. You're going to be there for a very short period of time, especially these days. You've got to give it full hammer commitment. And if he didn't have that full hammer commitment in the first place, he probably should have never stepped up to the job. I don't know. And he might well turn around and be able to say, well, I worked every Saturday, Sunday, I didn't think about anything else for a minute, or whatever else. But ultimately, that is the expectation. If you're the Prime Minister, it knocks only once. If it ever does knock. Um, and we'll talk a bit more about that later. Obviously, Andy Burnham, the big, big favorite to replace him. It would be an incredible surprise if it wasn't Burnham. Not a done deal yet, of course, but we did have some fairly plastic, fairly typical politics that went on over the past seven days, including West Streeting saying, we can't just have a coronation. It'd be terrible if we just had this coronation. Um, we must make sure that we have a proper leadership contest. And also we're Streeting yesterday. I won't be standing. No, it's fine now. Wes couldn't win. Um, he didn't have enough of the parliamentary Labor Party on side. There's no two ways about it. He might have got his ATMPs before Andy Burnham came along, but he's either been told he's not getting his ATMPs because they're all going to stand behind Burnham, or perhaps he's been offered a nice cabinet position. So let's not forget he was the Health Secretary who resigned, who really started the ball rolling on Starmer really having to go, in spite of all his chat, that he was going to stay and he was there to do it and he had the mandate and all the rest of that sort of stuff. So Streeting equals Chancellor. It's definitely one reading of the facts. Is that an 80 probability? No, definitely not at this stage, because he might have just been saving face. And Streeting is playing probably the best version I've seen of the political career, um, in terms of being quite strategic at this stage. But he's going to expect, I would have thought, one of the big three offices of State, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor, well suited to Chancellor and the bond markets quite like him. But we will talk about that, uh, at some more extent, uh, as we get through this video. So I, uh, will be going on for about an hour and a half today. Uh, a little bit shorter than that, hopefully. Uh, apologies and also thanks for the kind words about last week's Live that rambled on for three hours. Would that had three hours every day to put into it. I would have three hours of things to say. Anybody who knows me would know that by now, I'm sure, but that's where we are. Um, I'm also going to talk a bit about some of the advices that Burnham has already talked about appointing. I mean it really is probably a case of Burnham standing up or not being exposed as some kind of offender or someone on a register somewhere or something awful coming out the closet, which you'd assume would happen by now anyway with the mayor of Manchester and all the rest of it. I did say rather sarcastically to someone yesterday when we were talking about it, you know, he managed to budget 3 billion in Manchester. Not small beer, B billion with a B. Big money. Um, and he sorted out some nice transport. And if you've been on the Manchester Metro, I have a whole number of times and it's absolutely a piece of public transport I would choose and I actually enjoy going on. Whereas when I go to London, uh, I choose the Tube. I don't enjoy it. I've just got to get around London somehow and it's easier. You haven't even really got cabs as an option sometimes because the roads are so troublesome, uh, that you've got to get on the Tube. I don't envy anyone getting on the Tube today. Obviously, I'm in my full England, uh, supporter kit here, um, and it's about 32 degrees in a dark room with, ah, a curtain closed and a light beaming down on me. So awkward. I can't imagine the temperature in the Tube. And I haven't looked at the stats of how many people have fainted or whatever over the past 72 hours or so in London. So stay safe out there and stay hydrated folks. Um, that's what I'm trying to do. So got some interesting advisors, as I say, to talk about with, um, with Mr. Burnham. And then ultimately, um, we've got some interesting reports around housing and some of the stuff I've looked at in the Deep dive recently in the supplement and then the market numbers, uh, that we always look at, Chris Watkins numbers that we're interested in, the withdrawal rate in the open market at the moment in sales, the pricing gap. So the gap between what houses get listed at and then what they actually get sold at, as a general rule. That's not per, uh, house, by the way. Um, that is actually what gets listed in aggregate. The average price of aggregate listings and then the average price of aggregate sales. So when you have a market like we've had over the last nine months, certainly since, uh, there started to be speculation, or probably 12 months about more expensive houses being whacked further for tax, remember there were talks about taxes on houses worth more than 500k that absolutely jammed up that part of the market. Very, very damaging. Last August, horrific communications and media management by the Labour Party. And the primary reason why Starmer is out, actually, I think, to be honest with you, because terrible, terrible comms management and why he's giving up so much ground to someone like Farage, a far, far better communicator. Now, Burnham's got a different team, different social media team, packed with momentum activists, apparently, I'm told. Um, much more aggressive about what they'll put out. That will take on Polanski full bore and it will also compete for eyeballs on Tick Tock. So, um, divisive stuff, I'm afraid, folks. I've got no time for any of that. This isn't political. We're talking about politics. But I am not being political here. I'm here to be pragmatic and realistic. Talk about the economics of what's happening and then ultimately what does it mean for our mortgage rates? Because that is absolutely what we have to watch and what we have to consider when we're thinking about new chancellors. Apart from anything else. Bigger question for me than who the new PM is to a large extent, who is the new Chancellor? Now, before we get into that discussion, we've really got to frame it properly because there is an absolute elephant in the room question that we've also got to get out the way today. Will there be a general election? Now, what we normally see in these circumstances when the Prime Minister resigns midterm and there's nothing automatically an election triggered due to the constitution in the uk, what we normally see is people absolutely baying for an election, desperate for an election. We'd love an election. Let's just briefly go through the runners and riders and where they'd be today if there was an election. Starting with the fringes. Restore Britain, Big problem for them. No way. They would have as many candidates as they'd like. They'd absolutely be caught on the hop. They wouldn't be ready for it. Who would that favor? Well, actually, it would probably favor the right. It would probably favor Farage, because he's definitely nibbling Rupert Lowe's party nibbling away with that 7% it got in Makerfield. Um, and that 7% it tends to be polling in. In polls of YouGov has them about 5%, I think, but it doesn't actually name Restore yet. They're just in the other. But the other category normally lives at about 2%, is currently 5. So you might say, well, in you, according to you go restore got 3% of polling support. I think it's a little bit bigger than that myself. Green Party to go right to the other flank again, wouldn't be ready, wouldn't be organized. You know, they'd have to be actual policy rather than just shouting about how much money rich people have got whilst I don't pay council tax on my houseboat or whatever, blah, blah, blah. It'd be an utter mess for them as well. Now, that would favor Labor. So a little bit of balance there. Reform. The ones who are ready, I think, for this sort of eventuality, Farage has been saying for at least 12 months there will be an election, uh, either late 26 or early 27 or mid 27. Now he's now saying that's going to be on the back of a bond market meltdown caused by Andy Burnham. I think they've got that wrong. And I think at the end of the day, the only bond market meltdown we've seen over the last few years is Liz Truss, to whom a lot of reform supporters are sympathetic, which is an utter nonsense. This Truss is a total and utter incompetent who completely and utterly failed in the job that she was supposed to do. Including completely ignoring the checks and balances put in place. Exactly. To stop people like her, uh, economic idiots from crashing the economy. She ignored them. The economy crashed very briefly. The bond markets crashed. It didn't then lead into huge recession, luckily. But it didn't help with the inflation that we had to deal with. And it meant your interest rates went up a lot more than they otherwise would have needed to. What's known in the bond trading world as the moron premium, which lasted for years, even though she only lasted for 49 days or didn't outlast the lettuce or however you want to frame it. Right, so that's where reform would be. They'd be ready. They'd be the readiest of all the parties. Then we'll swing back around to the Lib Dems, shall we? So, the Lib Dems, I think they'd be in reasonable shape. But you know how Ed Davey does these things. You know, pictures of him skydiving and all the rest of it, you know, being a fun old chap. Uh, Lib Dems would probably do quite well because they can take votes from any other party. Um, and they sound quite strong on certain issues. They've been pretty half decent under Ed Davey. Will they get as many as 72 seats, which I think is what they're currently on? Um, I don't know. They sure be happy to roll the dice, I'm sure. With a possible chance of being in some kind of coalition over to the Conservatives. Uh, Badenoch, I don't think would be too happy. She wouldn't be ready because she's been loath to release too much about policy at all. So they'd have a real rush on their hands again. Who would that favour? Well, it would favour the Labour Party, to an extent of the people who are in the centre of those two things, but it would also favor reform if. If Conservatives don't look ready. Badenoch has done a great job since the budget. The. This really started this ascendancy, which has cost reform, some polling support since then of the post budget response speech, which she did to Rachel Reese, which is very, very well received and a lot of people's first real look at Kemi and how smart she is, apart from anything else, um, which she is very, very clever. But they would need to scramble in order to put out a reasonable amount of candidates. So does that mean we're going to see labor called an election? Um, I've left out Jeremy Corbyn's your party, or Fruit and nut or whatever you want to call it. I don't even know where that's at these days. It's such a mess. I don't think it's worth talking about particularly. And of course, there'd be independence, there'd be other things to consider, but they're the fringes, realistically. Um, so Burnham, people need to remember, is the only politician in this country who is polling more in a more positive way than Nigel Farage. He's about 30 or 35 points ahead of where Keir Starmer was when he started as Prime Minister. Right now, the cynic in me says, call the election now before anything gets messed up. He's as popular as he's ever going to be. And I can absolutely guarantee you he will have people in his ear making that argument to him right now. Here's a real dark side take on the whole thing. Labour, despite losing pretty Much every by election they come across, apart from Makerfield, of course, um, have still got a majority of about 170 MPs. But what no one does is they don't say, is that good? Do we want that? Now Starmer struggled with this, right, because we saw rebels very, very early on. I think he removed the whip from 11 or 12 people who were furious about the whole child benefits cap thing, which of course they've eventually conceded on anyway. Um, so he took a hard line early on, which is what he needed to do. But he has not had support of all of this party. And if you put a lot of store in what Pat McFadden was exposed as saying in the Mandelson files, to Mandelson, as in, this job's quite depressing. Um, everybody I speak to wants to know who we can tax more in order to give out more in benefits. Um, and it does feel like, you know, that is broadly what one would expect from the Labor Party. Redistributive economics. A lot of people will think, well that's fine, that's exactly what we knew we signed up for. And especially the metropolitan liberal elite won't have any issues with that sort of attitude at all. But for those of us who feel that we work pretty hard for a living, it's uh, a little bit upsetting to hear things like that, isn't it? Especially when the tax burden is the highest it's been since the Second World War. Right. So we have to bear things like that in mind. So they, the, the unspoken bit here is do you want 170 MPs majority? Now the MPs as a rule, a lot of them would not be happy because they would know labor are not going to get anything like 170 seat majority if they go to the country over the next couple of months, right? No chance in the world. Yeah, probably. And it's gut feel stuff. I think 40, 50, 60 would be roughly where they would be at. You'd have to see some proper polling and I'd always listen and defer to people like Sir John Curtis in these situations. That's just where it feels like to me at the moment. Because it would be a contest and it would be a contest between labor and reform. Let's not make any bones about it. Now the left historically are very, very good at organizing themselves for tactical voting. Right. Uh, and I think we saw quite a bit of that in Makerfield. Conservative supporters I don't think are beyond a bit of tactical voting either. But the right are extremely Divided because Farage is a very divisive figure. So Rupert Loby snapping at his heels for either revenge or because he feels so strongly about the whole cause, or whatever's really driving Rupert. I can't pretend to know what it is, but, you know, he is somewhat of a threat. There's no two ways about it. And he's very vocal and he's very, very erudite. Again, he's a very, very good communicator and he gets given platforms on big podcasts around the world. He was on Patrick David's podcast the other day. I saw, um, a significant amount of reach into the us who seems to take, uh, an unhealthy interest in British politics these days. To be honest, I'd have a good word about, um, not having donations from abroad. Apart from anything else, we desperately need to make that change in our constitution. But I don't want to digress too much. So Burnham might prefer a smaller majority of mps who are open loyalists and be very, very clear with all the candidates before he starts. No messing. Politics is a team sport. You do what I say. Right. And I don't think it would be phrased like that, but he wouldn't mind losing 100 mps, I don't suppose. Um, because ultimately you need a majority of one to get something through. And when you've got 170, you. You can have bands of 50 or 60 or 70 rebels still win a vote, but the optics are terrible. Right? Smaller team, easier to manage. Simple as that. Argument for not having an election. Right. And like I said, I haven't heard the usual number of calls. Everybody saying we need to have an election, they're sort of saying it and thinking, we don't really want one. That's the feeling that I get. It's nowhere near the amount of calls we normally get when there's a changeover of leader we. Which I'm sad to say, people are saying, you know, it will be our seventh PM in ten years. Um, technically, I guess it won't quite be because Cameron obviously resigned on the morning of the referendum, which is just over 10 years ago now.

Speaker D: This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. Reece, our content agent, wrote the copy based on our best practices, like mentioning Monday.com three times. That was the second. Johnny, our coordination agent, built the timeline and kept everyone aligned. Olivia, our human creative director, stayed in the loop because agents are great, but they don't always know when a joke lands. She had one note tell listeners it only takes minutes to build an agent. So minutes create your own AI agent. Today on Monday.com.

Speaker E: i started Ornod in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. Um, we run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on shopify.com so

Speaker B: it won't quite be the seventh in 10 years, but it's close enough to get the clickbait headline in there, isn't it? 6 in 10, 7 in 10. It's still an absolute joke, let's face it. Right, so the argument for not having an election, well, don't disturb the country, don't disturb the bond markets. This is my, my argument, not necessarily everybody else's. But why introduce all that uncertainty? We don't want it. As a general rule, I'd say that's probably correct. Right. So we don't want to see all of that going on necessarily. It's not necessarily going to be a good thing over the summer or whenever it would happen. Um, also, if, you know, people say, well, Keir Starmer was elected. Well, really, the Labour Party was elected with Keir Starmer at the helm. Keir Starmer polled minus three. That was the highest he ever polled in a popularity rating. People didn't like Starmer. Now, everybody knows the last election was about voting, not Tory. Right. And Labour were the only game in town. But let's talk about the technicals. They're elected on the back of a manifesto and they could still deliver that manifesto. So is Burnham happy working within the existing framework, including the existing fiscal rules, which of course he couldn't name when someone asked him about that sort of stuff. Doesn't feel like that's really his wheelhouse is going to need a really strong Chancellor on that front. And there are changes that could be made to the fiscal rules. One that's really pertinent in property, in housing, is changing the fiscal rules such that social housing was ruled to be critical infrastructure, something that I'd actually be significantly in favour of because of the long term economic, um, benefits. And this is what we need. Rachel Reeves did a bit of this and, you know, she's still in post. There's maybe a 5% chance she stays in post. Real continuity candidate. No, um, idea about the relationship between Burnham and Reeves and whether they're on the same page politically. Uh, I'm sure she'll be lobbying to stay there because she's going to have that awkward situation that I referred to in a social media post earlier this week when she's going to need to serve an eviction notice on her tenant. And of course they need four months to be able to get out. And I don't think Rachel will have four months in number 11 Downing street in order to move on. But they've got another rental property, perhaps that could come up as well. But of course that would be subject to the same laws that they've passed themselves. Oh, the irony. If that were to be the case. Um, so that's where we are the real life biting in terms of policy that they'll now have to deal with, apart from anything else, because they obviously famously rented out the family home, didn't get a selective license that they were supposed to get. Haven't heard anything about huge fines and rent repayment orders for Rachel, though. That's. That's funny. So I thought ignorance of the law was no excuse. Or is it is that I'm hearing one rule for one, one rule for another. I wonder where that whole two tier care chat came from. Anyway, perhaps we can put all that to bed now. Um, and we want to ultimately get back to what's going on in the property market, um, and what's going on the world economy that is going to influence the property market. So, um, Trump Watch. Everyone who reads the supplement or has listened to one of these before will know. Since January 2025, I've been keeping a very, very close eye on the Orange Man. Um, he did this crazy bit of social media, almost like a wrestling promo, like a lot of his stuff is, which was almost like something off the Apprentice, saying, you know, gears, Dharma, you're fired sort of thing. Um, but, you know, Starmer has ultimately fallen on his own sword, presumably because all of his even closest loyalists kind of said, don't make us all resigned from the Cabinet and embarrass you. Kia. I think that's what went on over the weekend. Um, that's where we knew where we are. Right. So, um, the one thing I haven't said is ultimately Burnham did a really comprehensive win in Makerfield. I did predict that would happen. I did say he would absolutely hose in. And he absolutely did. It was always going to happen. Um, there was that a protest pope. And let me just pause for a second there on the big problem that Farage has got now. On an ongoing basis. The 5 million donation, most of us, 99.99 of us or more, cannot conceptualize what that would be like for someone to give you £5 million. In fact, arguably the only people who could would be a lottery winner. It genuinely is lottery win, sum of money, right, to get. Um, it doesn't look good, does it? Wherever it came from, however the tax position is treated and all the rest of it, I don't think people really even care about that bit. I don't know why people are even focusing on it. They care about the fact that there cannot be a transaction of 5 million pounds because someone's a nice guy or someone believes in the cause so much or whatever. Even if the donor is a near billionaire or a centi millionaire or whatever he is. Um, it doesn't feel right, it doesn't smell right and I must say what it feels like to me. And I'll reveal secretly to the few hundred people or so who are going to watch this at some point in time or listen to this. I went undercover the other night to a Reform UK event. Don't worry, I'm not going to come out wearing a Nigel Farage football shirt as Samuel Leeds did when I recently was interviewed by him on his podcast. Um, I went to see what's going on because I like to keep an eye on a lot of things from a political perspective. It's not the only sort of political events that I attend, but I'm not particularly well known locally at all. My portfolio is all over the country, um, and I didn't recognize a single face in that room, even though it was in North Solihull. So I took someone with me. Not, uh, for security, don't worry. But interesting enough, we got there nice and early. Happily, the place was air conditioned. And apart from anything else, the first conversation I heard was about HMOs and Serco. And actually the people having that conversation were really quite well informed. It wasn't the sort of stuff that I've been used to seeing plastered over reform socials and the sort of relatively uneducated comments that I see going on about that stuff on social media. Um, and I remember just thinking, gosh, I better be quite quiet about the sort of tenure and the sort of size of portfolio I've got and all the rest of it, in which case they'd be quite torn between or large successful or deemed to be successful. Portfolio Landlord versus what's the tenure and who are you? Who are you looking after? What tenants have you got in your Properties. I don't think they were up for a social impact conversation about any of that, let's just say. So I kept quiet, which, if you know me, is fairly difficult for me to do. But anyway, I digress slightly. I did find that event very interesting. It was reasonably well attended, even though England were playing football that night. Um, which, which says quite a lot, I think, apart from anything else. And the room looks a certain way and seems a certain way, um, but it didn't strike me as a bunch of people foaming at the mouth. On the bright side, they're obviously coming round to the fact that if they are really going to prepare for government, they're going to actually have to prepare for government. And whilst the speaker, uh, revealed that he wasn't necessarily enamored with some of the failed Tories, let's call them what they are, who, who they'd imported, he also, uh, his analogy was it was a bit like a Sunday League football club signing a couple of ex Premier League players who bring a lot of experience to the team. And look, you can, you can see it, can't you? Can, you can understand it. Um, so we've talked already about a safe pair of hands. We're going to talk a bit about, um, Donald Trump, Elon Musk. Obviously reform don't have Elon Musk's support, that, that belongs to Restore Britain, apart from anything else. So let's crack on with, uh, with what we've been talking about. And also Chris Watkins real time property market as well. So there's this crazy withdrawal rate going on at the moment in the market. 46.

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker B: 46 of houses that hit the open market are being withdrawn unsold. It is a nearly. It's so difficult to get your head around that number. But when I tell you that even in the hot market of 20, 21, people were still only selling about, um, two thirds of what was listed. The withdrawal rate was still about 33% then. So maybe 47 doesn't sound too bad. It's just how toxic the estate agency is as a general rule, especially at the corporate level. Over instruct, over instruct, over instruct, over promise. And then they use the Chinese water torture technique to drip the price down. Not everyone's up for that. And a lot of people just, honestly, they just believed what they were told. It's not just about greed. This is, of course, a lot of people go for the highest figure that an estate agent will give them and they shouldn't do that. But people become better and better informed These days, Zoopla tells you what your house is worth. And what the agent does in the real world is they look you in the eyes when they come in, they read your body language and they decide whether you're a motivated seller or not. Now, some places will still put the property on the market even though they're not motivated sellers, because it doesn't cost a lot to get them on. And, um, people who aren't motivated sometimes become motivated as they work them down the funnel, as they ultimately walk the price backwards on them when they're doing their continual reductions. And ultimately corporates especially behave as they're targeted. So they're targeted on a number of listings, they're targeted on number of reductions. So guess what? My favorite quote of them all, Charlie Munger, show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. And that's exactly what happens in the estate agency. Right, um, so big drag still on stock in the south of England. I've been talking about it for at least a year and a half now. Um, Midlands and the north doing well. But really it comes down to rather than geography, which, uh, is very Andy Burnham topically enough, rather than geography, it really is about cheaper houses versus more expensive houses and it's also about flats versus houses. And flats are selling very, very, very badly indeed. We've also, of course, had the news over the past week that we are going to finally see that reform in the housing market in the way that things work and have more like what will look like a Scottish system in place, where up there they call it a home report. You have the survey done, um, before anybody spends any money on lawyers and things like that. So the vendor's got to pay for it. Costs about a few hundred quid. Um, but ultimately it will save time and money massively. Leasehold will still be a nightmare. So the English figures will still never match the Scottish figures. Even if we came up with a better system than the home report system. And it's pretty robust. And, um, by the way, if you're listening to this thinking, I don't like the idea of this home report. I mean, the home report puts a value, to be clear, on the property. The rick surveyor puts a value on the property. Now, these are malleable. Right, let's also get that out of the way. First of all, there's 10% up or down in any valuation because this is an, ah, underscience put together right now. There might be, there will be in the odd occasion, surveyors who are friendly, let's just call it with the vendor who are going to put some extra on those home reports in order to create a fake discount. And this is something that unfortunately happens a reasonable amount in the property world, even with some fairly good, clean looking, uh, big property influencers, they rely on tactics like that, overvaluing things to then discount them or give the appearance of a discount. Whereas really they're just selling things at the actual Rick's value and they're selling things that are going to lose value as soon as they've sold them because they're new builds. But I'll let you work out who that is. I might talk about that more extensively one day. I'd love to, but I also don't want to get sued, so let's bear that in mind. Um, but yeah, the cheaper stuff selling, the more expensive stuff is not selling so well. The leasehold is not selling well at all. Leasehold reform is a bit of a joke and we'll still be talking, talking about it in five years time because it's going to be absolutely gummed up in the courts by freeholders and all the rest of it. Um, we are where we are. So if anyone's listening to this and they've got any pricing gap, um, examples, uh, certainly in the Midlands, the pricing gap tends to look more like about 10%, as in what gets listed, what gets sold. It's not this sort of crazy. Um, we've seen 25, we've seen 25% plus a few weeks ago it has normalized a little bit. Our last figure from Chris was 21%, so not too bad, I suppose. Right, okay, on to what we're going to look at this week from the macro perspective. So the macroscope as I call it. Um, there's been mortgage pricing, which we've looked at apart from anything else. What's quoted, what do people effectively pay, what about the debt? And I want to sort of expand that point. I'm going to start there and expand that point a little bit more with chat on the UK economy and something that I think people need to understand that I'd be concerned that Andy Burnham actually doesn't understand. Nobody frames it in this way, but there we go. Right. Inflation. I've been talking extensively about inflation for five and a half years now because I could see that the fallout of the pandemic, I wasn't on it, wasn't on that bus as quickly as Gary Stevenson was, I m must say, but I was on that bus when the bank of England was sending out edicts to people suggesting that they were to the commercial banks saying, do you know what we might do here? We might actually um, go to negative interest rates. So I believe that was February 2021 when they sent out some missives to that effect and prepare yourselves. At that point in time I was convinced that inflation was coming. And of course once inflation is coming, interest rates aren't far behind in terms of having to rise. Even though I strongly, strongly felt, and I wrestled with conclusion for months, to be honest with you, even though I felt really strongly the economy wasn't in position for interest rates to rise aside from anything else. But I uh, turned out to be wrong because the stimulus protected us from everything that had been done on that front. And of course we did have our first interest rate rise in December 2021. But uh, it wasn't, people weren't seeing it as part of a cycle. They just saw it as all rates have gone up. You know, rates had been tweaked upwards and downwards even in the, what's called the ZIRP period, the Zero Interest Rate Policy period. And they had gone to half a percent in, I think it was March 09 when that happened. And they stayed at half a percent for a long time. They dropped after the Brexit referendum to restore confidence in the uk ah, economy. They then moved upwards. We got to the heady heights of 3/4 of a percent in 2018 I believe it was. Then they were cut again and in Covid they went down to 0.1 on the base rate, the lowest that they'd ever been in their 325 plus year history of the bank of England. So a very narrow trading range we would call that realistically. So you can understand why people in December 2021 weren't thinking, well this is the way, we're on a massive hiking cycle now. But it was very, very clear to me by then that we were. And that's when I started talking extensively about what I was doing in my own business, which was breaking the mortgages that existed and then refixing out to 2027 and beyond. Um, I broke every mortgage we had in the group's portfolio out until June 2024. That had an um, an end date, a ah, fixed end date of before June 2024. Broke them all, it was about 200, refinanced them all. Banks had a good day with, you know, at least a quarter of a million quids worth of ercs, ah, and all the rest of it. But ultimately they were refixed at 3point xx percent and things like that, which at the moment looks pretty, pretty clever, right? I didn't want to be as right as I was. I didn't predict Russia, Ukraine. I did not know what the lettuce was going to do and when that kamikwazi joke of a budget was released. But um, all I was saying was the risks are to the upside. Insure yourself against risks. Don't take risks that you don't get well paid for.

Speaker D: This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy. Create your own AI agent today on Monday dot com.

Speaker F: Okay, I have a business question for you. Where did you get your domain on wix? It was really easy. Was it actually easy or are you exaggerating? No, really, it took like 90 seconds. I even built a full website. What do you mean? I just used wix Harmony just told it what I wanted and it built a fully functional website for me in minutes. It also comes with hosting security, privacy protection, everything.

Speaker B: Oh cool.

Speaker F: Yeah, check it out@wix.com domains.

Speaker B: So even though it cost me money, it saved me a huge amount of money over that time period. Right, so, so what, what does that mean? And how do mortgages and how does all that compare to what's going on, uh, in the bigger and broader economy? And what does it mean for inflation? Right, so bank of England money and credit report that I had analyzed, I always look at on a monthly basis. Um, they've got the back book. The existing stock of mortgage debt is sitting at 3.93%.

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker B: The most recent month's completions which was April, 4.08%. The average five year fix that people are taking out at the moment according to the right move numbers, 4.92%. So that was snapshot from April, the back book, which is all the fixed rate mortgages that are out there at the moment. Right. And the variable rate ones as well, for that matter. 3.93. So tiny, tiny difference between the back book and what was going on in April. Bear in mind April's completions, which would have been February's offers pre Iran and all the rest of it. 4.92 being the number today or being the number a couple of weeks ago from Rightmove when that report came out. Now we're not 4.92 today. We trade at around about the gilt yield on the residential mortgage market. So we're more down to about 4.3, the two year was a bit more wonky at the time. I would suggest today we're probably about 4.4 ish, 4.5 maybe, depending on the blend between two years and five years. And of course other fixed periods are available. But the vast, vast majority of people tend to fix at one of those two too. So there's a spike coming that we're going to see in later bank of England money and credit reports. And is this why the market has slowed down? And Chris has done some numbers for me very kindly, because I love context. I'm obsessed with context. There is not much point pointing out numbers like I just did without saying, what does that mean? Well, the average mortgage rate over time actually up until 2008 was 6%, right? So 4.92 even doesn't feel too bad. But it's what we've got used to, it's what we've been conditioned to. And the change in the price of credit and actually the availability of credit is the absolute number one most important thing in terms of defining what house prices are doing. Now. How does that relate to. Because I mentioned the UK government. How does that relate to the government? Because, uh, people like me often say, well, government finances don't work like household finances and all the rest of it. In fact, the reality is there are no people like me because I take things from all the schools of economics without having to treat it like a football match where you must be X or you must be Y or you must be Z. I ultimately am interested in the facts. And, um, the left get things wrong, the right gets things get things wrong. They also both get things right. And it's about trying to take the best bits from any of that. So here's a stat that gets wheeled out an awful lot. You know, we spend more on defense, uh, we spend more on interest, I'm sorry, paying interest on government bonds and we do on everything apart from the health service second place and welfare first place. And when I say wealth, care, to be clear, that includes pensions, which people? Certain people political parties don't make very clear. And not only does it include pensions, pensions is about half of that welfare bill. And that's why there's a significant problem which needs a reasonable, ah, solution to it. But I'll talk about policy another day, I'm sure. So, 110 billion last year and actually over 20 billion last month, which was a pretty scary number. About a 4 billion overshoot compared to what the OBR was expecting. This is bad news, right? Forget about the stupidly big numbers that we can't even conceptualize. But it's bad news because what it does, it eats into the reserves that whoever is the Chancellor has got for the next budget and puts them in a difficult position. That's what happened to Rachel Reeves. She also had Jeremy Hunt's poison pill drops in things like employees, national insurance, which she was always going to have to make up a gap for. And there were gaps in the methodology, um, including things like, I believe the conservatives used to account for. A certain amount of money would come back every year that was allocated budget spending, but there was a tendency for people not to spend everything in all departments and then it was returned back to the coffers. Sounds pretty reasonable to me that you would allow for that, but you'd have to have a contingency. Rachel. We've tried to pretend that was an absolutely terrible thing to do and labor would never do such a thing and they were going to do things properly and all the rest of it. But such a technical point probably not even worth making. But what is the point? Well, we're constantly told we owe about 3 trillion. Again, even more of a ridiculous number that we can't conceptualize. 3 Elon Musk's as it goes, depending on how SpaceX is doing. When you watch this video, um, because the ipo, if you haven't seen, has had the shine come off it and the videos have stopped and all the rest of it, as you might expect, pretty, um, standard ipo. Don't want to say I told you so. It happens every time on IPOs, apart from a very, very small number. Um, but generally speaking, they're overhyped, they're oversold. It's a marketing exercise in ipo and it works on retail punters. Unfortunately, time in, time out, some people traded it, they got in, they got out fairly quickly. Well done them. If they made 30% or whatever they made. Um, if you can time things like that, you probably don't need to be listening to videos like this because I'm about low risk, low volatility, uh, medium to high returns, some efforts. That's what property requires. Ultimately that's what you can achieve if you make the right moves, apart from anything else. So, 110 billion paid out. 3 trillion in debt. Ah. Uh, now what's the bit that people don't talk about? Well, a. How much more debt this year than last year? So has it gone up by 110 billion? Uh, there or thereabouts. So we haven't actually paid anything out. We've just borrowed in order to pay the interest. Now, I know what you're going to say. That sounds awfully like a Ponzi scheme, Adam, doesn't it? And in reality, it kind of is. Right? But ultimately it's a Ponzi scheme where we have got significant reserves coming into the country, uh, every, every year, um, or significant receipts coming in through the tax system, over a trillion quids worth, apart from anything else. So we're liquid, we're solvent, and, um, that's the game that we all play. Um, but even more importantly, in a year, if about, if you work out 110 over 3, uh, over 3,000 as a percentage is about 3.3%. Exactly 3.3%, actually. So if the inflation rate was 3.3%, which has been above that at, uh, certain points over the last 12 months, then in real terms, what's happened? Well, exactly what happens when we have a mortgage, right? The debt is actually, well, slightly different from us because we normally have a nominal mortgage. That amount stays the same maybe until we refinance it and pull capital out. Right? But ultimately that's, uh, that's part of the way we can make money out of sensibly leveraging properties, right? We borrow 100k against the property in 5 years time, that 100k, thanks to inflation, all the rest of it is only worth about 85k, but we, it's a nominal hundred. But the house price has been dragged up by inflation by other factors in the interim. So we get to leverage inflation and that's incredibly powerful. The government leverage inflation leverages inflation more than anybody else can and would do. So really what happened last year is the debt that we paid, we borrowed to pay it off, we borrowed to pay the interest on it. And, um, in real terms, we owe the same amount of money. And I'm absolutely obsessed with talking about things in real terms because they do need adjusting for. And then you can choose what you adjust them for. CPI inflation, RPI inflation, wages, gross wages, net wages. Right way. Real household disposable income. There are a number of other metrics you could choose, right? But do adjust, because nominal figures usually just quoted. It's the old Disraeli lies, damn lies and statistics. If you don't adjust, and the problem is when you do start adjusting them, it all gets a bit boring, to be honest with you, because it's not the lovely story that makes those headlines in the Guardian or whatever it's supposed to do, right? So we've got to this point, this, uh, convergence point in the mortgage back book to go back to mortgages and where we were 3.93% on the back book. The existing stock of debt, 4.0, uh, 8 on the new stuff that was issued in 8 that settled in April. Very, very close. So basically 4% in the middle of those. Roughly where we are. I think that's roughly where a resi mortgage will sit for some time. Actually. My best guess, once the war has kind of evened its way through the bond markets and the bond markets are, uh, less worried about who the next Chancellor might be and put to bed any thoughts of it being Miliband or McDonald and McDonald wasn't a real candidate. I just said that to remind uh, everybody how bad it could have been. And uh, as I've been saying over the past couple of weeks, be careful what you wish for right now. The problem again could have been and could still be that people whose re mortgages are expiring this year, of which I am one on my, on my own home, are used to coming off a fairly good rate. Some of them were lucky enough to be on rates under 1% at the time. So anything is going to be a shock compared to that. Four percent is four times more than 1%. You know, it's a huge, huge increase. Doesn't mean your payments quadruple because apart from anything else, you have a repayment mortgage and there are other steps you can take. Extend the term of the mortgage so that your capital repayment element goes down. Uh, you obviously have to look at the capital and interest side of it. But many people don't. They say I paid my mortgage this month. Who cares what's going to capital and interest? Well, you should do because that's probably, if you are not building a property portfolio, the biggest single asset you'll ever have, um, and you'd rather pay it off quick, sooner rather than later, and not be exposed to this volatility in the interest rate or having to go to work, if you look at it that way, not um, that you can necessarily give up work just because you've got an unencumbered property. You still need to do things like eat, don't you? Aside from anything else. So when is this all going to kick in? What are we going to see? Well, this is the nature of the blended five year pathway we've been on because obviously we're sort of four and a half years after the first interest rate hike that happened. I referred to earlier on in December 2021. Um, and we're really three and a half years on from the meltdowns of the Liz Trust debacle and all the rest of it, which really changed the, uh, yields for quite a while. But there's quite a few people who I've spoken to whose mortgage is expiring this year because they fixed it two years ago, hoping for a lower rate if they can hang on. If they're hanging on for the next couple of months or whatever, they might find that lower rate than in 2024. Um, again, for context. Right, so where are we at, um, on the open market? Going back to context around that we're not selling anywhere near the June has started. So we're now 25 days as I'm recording this, uh, about 8% below the number of sales agreed in June 2025. Why? Well, mortgage pricing hasn't helped. Sponsored by Middle east conflict and all the rest of it. Positivity was in the air in June 25 because rates were on a going down sort of cycle. The only real realistic argument was how quickly or not are they going down. So very, very different to June 26th where it's like, when will all this be over? Is this actually over? I know Donald Trump has docusigned a treaty, blah, blah, blah. Is the oil going to be okay?

Speaker D: Oil?

Speaker B: As I'm recording this, West Texas intermediate is under 70 a barrel. So some of the rabid, foaming at the mouth, left wing economists are still posting things about how the world's still going to fall apart because of what Donald Trump's done. Um, I'm getting more and more frustrated by seeing that content, to be honest with you, because I think what these people do is very Robert Kiyosaki sort of thing. If you call the crash once a week, then when the crash happens, if you select that one video out of 900, that said, what's going to happen has happened and you just cover all the bases with your videos. It's actually like a scam. It's like a scam. You might have heard this scam before. If you, a horse racing tipster, if he can send out tips to a hundred thousand people, he picks one horse race and he sends 200,000 people the favorite, 100,000 people the second favorite, blah, blah, blah. Then it goes down into a funnel and by the end of about four races, about 40 people are convinced this is the greatest horse racing tipster of all time. But it's just a mathematical game and smoke and mirrors. Um, and this happens all the way from Ray Dalio to Richard Murphy and Steve Keane on completely the other side of the fence. Dalio's been calling crashes since the early 1990s. Sometimes he's been right, of course. Sometimes he's called them for the wrong reasons. Most of the time he's been wrong. And I don't like the content because I think it, it causes anxiety to people and it's clickbait and, um, it's not for me. So hopefully you won't catch me doing any of that. If I think something's going to go wrong or is actively going wrong, I will tell you right here and right now, it's generally what I will do. So are we expecting a big meltdown because of these mortgages dropping off? No, this is pain that's concentrated if it's a 2021 mortgage in a small number of households. The real moral of the story is the market has nearly, assuming our 4.92 figure from Rightmove has today come down to about 4.4, 4.5, as I said, um, it's really a bit more of a rounding error now and perhaps we'll see. July pick up. So 8% fewer sales agreed than July 25th. 3 or 4% fewer sales agreed than June 24th. Right. But still well ahead of 2023. June, where things were still pretty miserable. We're still sweeping up. And actually June 23rd was when the bond yields hit their highest the five year. Anyway, uh, that they have done for, for some years, 4.98%. So we weren't up at 4.98, but we did dabble with 4, 6, 4, 7, um, over the past couple of months or so. Assuming this ceasefire is sticking, assuming that's all sorted, um, we may still need an interest rate rise. I think they'll hold off as long as they can at the bank of England, because it's very, very clear the governor is not in favor of a rise and is doing the hard bit, doing what he needs to do, on balance. Luckily for him, he's not burdened by knowing lots about economics. But as I've said before, perhaps that's a good thing, because ultimately a good chief executive is going to have to trust the people he's got in his team, um, and the information that they give to them. Right, what next? Well, we've discussed construction and it is, it is an utter horror show. The PMIs under 50 for 17 months in a row. Worst numbers since, uh, we don't count Covid, because some of the numbers were a bit silly, of course, during COVID Worst number since 2009 in the sector. The 300,000 homes a year target, which is the only shred of credibility the Labour Party could potentially preserve on the one and a half million homes target. Get to an election and say, you see, we did 300,000. If you times that by 5 it'd be 1.5 million. We had to sort out the mess of the Tories, blah, blah, blah, yawn, yawn, yawn. Even though not. It's not really a political thing. Um, but the shock stat, really, that I've shared over the last week or so is that in 2010 it took 107 days to get planning permission. And in 2025, summer is here, which

Speaker C: means we all want to look and feel our best. A GLP1 may be right for you. Visit orderlymeds.com to learn more about which GLP1 you could be eligible for. Getting started is fast, easy and happens virtually through telemedicine from licensed professionals. Check it out for yourself. Go to orderlymeds.com podcast. That's orderlymeds.com podcast. Taking care of yourself feels great. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details.

Speaker F: Can you believe it? The business I'd been about to start lived in my head for two years. But last night I finally bought the domain on Wix. Took me 90 seconds and suddenly it was real. I even used WIX Harmony, wix's AI website builder, to create a full website in minutes. Didn't even have to stress about security, privacy or any of that technical stuff. It all came included. That's two years of stalling, one night of progress. Don't wait like I did. Go to wix.com domains.

Speaker B: It took about 350 days, so more than treble the length of time to get planning permission for something. So of course it absolutely jammed up what was going on in terms of new units, in terms of supply, in terms of the housing market. Bit of a mess, I think it's fair to say. Right. Um, EPC new build count. So this is one of the ways in which we measure how many new dwellings there are, how many new EPCs are there? 210,000 is the number. So 30% below where we need to be. Exactly where I like to try and buy my property, actually, as it goes. Not that that's easy, folks. Apart from anything else, um, what do we want to be happening? We need a construction PMI that's above the watermark, above 50. Um, particularly in the resi section, of course. Because that is the section that builds the houses. Um, we do want the civil engineering to be solvent and doing okay in order to support that. And then the commercial building, um, people do commercial and resi builds, but they tend to be specialists in one or the other as a rule. Apart from at the very top tier level where they'll do a bit of everything, of course. Um, where do we need the EPC count to be? It needs to be starting with a three, not a two, doesn't it? Simple maths.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Apart from anything else, how far away is that from. To put that into perspective, it's like being in a different postcode. And I don't just mean one letter at the end changed either. Um, but this is the absolute bull case for existing stock. We're not doing anything like enough in order to bring the number of units to, to, you know, we're doing. About 0.7% of our market is primary every year is new build. That's how pathetic it is. Even at full steam it'd be 1%. So it really isn't that much of a big deal, to be honest with you. But it just keeps everybody talking about it. And of course we do need new homes. Homes, properties are wasting asset apart from anything else. And, uh, some bright Spark in about 1980 realized that the plan was stop building social homes or that was the way that things were going to go. Sell them off to create, to keep people quiet in the social sector and give them a bit of a panacea and not really replace them. And that was a huge mistake apart from anything else. Um, but ultimately that's where we saw, you know, massive discounts and a transfer of wealth to a generation. Brilliant opportunities to be able to do that. Um, but then we consigned generations after that to renting, um, and m not in social homes because there weren't enough left. So push them into the private sector. Uh, people have always wanted to be in the private sector because the standards are higher apart from anything else. And the private sector absolutely exploded right now since 2016, it's been flatlining because of hostile policy changes. The government did that thing. They do go on. We've effectively tacitly encouraged this. Encouraged it. Tony Blair did nothing to discourage it at all. In fact, you know, the huge ramping up of credit that went on, um, in the 2000s was under Gordon Brown's watch as Chancellor and Tony Blair's as pm. And they did nothing about it, even though it was looking very, very dangerous at the time. Not that I was running These videos at the time, folks, I'm afraid, but I can't tell you what I would have said. I know what I think I would have said. Um, but let's see, let's see what happens. Um, so we've got this interesting situation at the moment with the bank rate being 3.75, bank base rate. There's been a Bank of England committee meeting recently, obviously to keep it at 3.75. Two people voting upwards. Hugh Pill, chief economist, convinced that we're going to need to raise the rates at some point. And Megan Green, non exec. Um, she's also fairly hawkish as a general rule, which means she leans on the side that would put rates up rather than hold them if she thinks it's needed. It's pretty close. But of course further information will be developing and they'll be watching the figures as they come through, apart from anything else. Now, talking to the chief economist of the bank of England, I was absolutely very, very heartened to see and it reminded me of the hope that I had when the Labour Party got elected. Now you might say, as if you believed them, you idiot. Which is fair enough. Uh, I didn't really believe them. I wanted to believe them because it's. Psychologically it was easier what was there. And you know, they all think we're all so stupid we can only deal with three words. That's what the spin doctors tell them and they are growth, growth, growth. Or they were kind of stopped saying it after they weren't really doing anything particularly good at all on growth, didn't they? But of course they didn't facilitate growth. They were going to say they were talking about regulating to growth and that in itself was an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms. Um, I should say. Um, so I'm not ever clear how that was, ever thought that was going to work really. They deregulated some of the city and they've seen some growth since then. I think the city, quite big fans of Rachel Reeves. Um, but there we go. Uh, five year bond yields, 4.3 roughly at the moment. 10 year we had a double a sniff around at 5%. The 10 year is important because that's the new debt that we take on. Um, so coming back to the point I made before, if we paid about 3.3%, bring that analogy back to the. The houses outstanding stock, our stock as a nation, outstanding mortgages, 3.92% at the moment, government 3.3. But how much drops off every year and how much new debt is created? We know that 3.3 is going upwards because the market price at the minute is in the fours or the fives at the longer end of the curve. I wouldn't be issuing a lot of yields at the longer end of the curve if it was me. But that's because I'd also be doing things to try and fix the longer end of the curve. Then I'd do loads of stuff at uh, the longer end of the curve and reinvest it in infrastructure apart from anything else. But look, what do I know about policy and politics, right? Um, because the 30 year bond at the moment, five and a half percent which I think offers exceptional value to people who don't want to put a lot of effort in and are willing to gamble that ultimately uh, inflation won't be too damaging. Five and a half does give you an awful lot of room um, for maneuver on that front. Right. Uh, why do we pay more for our debt than anybody else? Well our fiscal credibility has been in the toilet since Liz Truss to be honest. And then we change our Prime Minister again. It doesn't look good. Right, it doesn't look good but also the UK economy does run a bit hotter. Inflation tends to be a bit higher and we have got a big stock of debt out there especially on a net basis. I uh, heard someone the other day wheel out the old Japan trope. You know Japan have got 250 of GDP GP as debt. Well they have, right, but that's their gross debt position. They've also got 170 of GDP as assets including an absolute boatload of you of uh, U. S government bonds. Over a trillion dollars worth of U. S Government bonds. The Japanese own didn't have anybody mentioning that. So actually the UK net debt position is worse than the Japanese net debt position. Ours uh, is about 84, theirs is about 75. So bit of a tragedy there on that front. Compare that to Norway for example who have about 30 debt to GDP so they still use debt but they use it intelligently and they pay very small amount for it, 2% something like that as a general rule. Compare that to their sovereign wealth fund of 2 trillion which depending on what percentage you wanted to use on what they'd expect to return on it every year. But I'm sure they expect to return 7 or 8% roundabout there on that sort of money every year. So you know, serious, serious money isn't it? 150 billion plus, um, just in, in, in growth in that fund and it gives them an awful lot that would pay our interest Bill, let alone the very small interest rate bill in Norway, which of course has a lot lower GDP than the UK does. But there we go. Right, so we've got to remember, February wise, we were talking about three, potentially up to three cuts in the base rate this year. I thought there'd be one lean on two, but I was hedging my bets on one at the time. We then got to a stage where the market thought there'd be four rises in the next 12 months. Pretty typical overreaction. Overreacted more than the oil price did, really, as a general rule. Um, now as of today, the market thinks there might be about 1 rise in the next 12 months. I still think they can end up being wrong. And I still think today I could make a case quite happily for base rate still being 3.75 by the end of the year. Um, well, some of that is also the surprise inflation number that we had in May. Why Was it only 2.8%? It was released the other day. That was like April's 2.8, which was expected because that's when all this stuff was cut off. Household energy bills. Um, I think the point was, and I think what people are getting wrong, is that ultimately in April, the expectation was 2% or 2.1. Not from me. I still thought it would be more like 2.4, but anyway, middle east situation put paid to all of those predictions and made it 2.8. So still well overshot what the expectations were six weeks before. We have a bit more stability than we might have expected. I probably would have expected it to go back to about 3 or so, but 2.8 isn't a million miles away for May. Does that mean inflation is much more under control? Private sector wages currently going up at 2.9% apart from anything else. Then we've got to think about employment figures as well. Um, employment was relatively pleasing in terms of the macro figures that came out on that front. Uh, we stayed under 5% unemployment. I talk about this every time I talk about unemployment. It's not really the numbers that I'm interested in. The numbers that I'm interested in are ultimately the number who are employed, which is about 75%, and then the number that are economically inactive. Um, because that is much more key because it's much, much bigger. Unemployment around 5%, economic inactivity around 2021. Right. So much, much more damaging for the country. There are people of working age who are inactive. It's not all damaging. Some of them are students. Right. So let's give them an easy time. People have got to learn, especially in this day and age, to try and give themselves a point. Bit of an edge other than anything else. So please do bear that in mind. But I'm also interested in the number of vacancies that there are, and vacancies are particularly low at the moment. We've been seeing a lot of this natural wastage, almost certainly some of it due to AI. Right. It's not necessarily getting rid of loads of jobs, it's not replacing people. Right. And what a lot of companies will need to do is they need to be churn because they might be able to halve their workforce, but they might end up paying that workforce 50 more than they were already paying the people before because they need different skills, they need to be prompt engineers. Right. They need to be able to curate 15 or 20 bots. A lot of people don't necessarily want to live their life like that. They don't want to live in the dark room, they don't want to live in the office. They want people to talk to. They'd like to get up and go for a cup of coffee or have a glass of water at the water fountain and talk about how they're going to be playing football on a Wednesday night at school. You can't do that with Claude. And I love Claude, right? Don't get me wrong, but you can't do that with Claude. So just bear that in mind, folks. Okay? Okay. So the heartening news. Um, Keir Starmer gave us some heart at the start. If we were naive enough to believe growth, growth, growth and all the rest of it. And now Andy Burnham's here to give us hope. Hope was the message in his, in his little one minute snippet that made it all over the Internet. And I think you have to have hope. I am an annoyingly optimistic person because you have to be. The alternative is really not very good at all. Right? It's living your life miserably, apart from anything else. And I've had some more hope over the past 48 hours because I've heard that he's appointed Andy Haldane, who was the chief economist and he built the bank of England for 30 years. The only person at the bank of England who in 2021, when I was busy calling the inflation that was coming through the pipe and, uh, absolutely, quite frankly, deriding the bank of England for pretending that this inflation was going to be transitory, had a joke and only a true nerd, so true economics and finance nerd can have this sort of joke with another economics and finance nerd friend of mine that ultimately everything's transitory. You know, 40 years is transitory, isn't it? It's just a period of 40 years where it passes through the system. And I say 40 years quite deliberately because if you look back at all the pandemics in history, the resultant inflation that comes on the back of the structural changes to the economy that the pandemic makes is about 30 to 40 years at, uh, about 1% more than the legacy rate was before the pandemic came along. So this is one of the core reasons why I've been saying I strongly believe we live in a 3% world these days, not a 2% world. But no one will openly come out and say it. But frankly, if the central bank isn't acting when inflation does start with a 3, which it will do at some point later on in the year, then it's kind of saying, well, we're kind of tolerating things that are outside of the range. Right. UK we have a pretty strict one and a half to two and a half percent range, but by the end of the forecast period. So if you can find an excuse. Sorry. I mean, if the mathematical models, which I'm sure are never manipulated by anyone at the bank of England see the inflation rate as being lower than 2 1/2% in three years time, and ideally as close to 2% as possible, that makes them look good. Apart from those, they never hit their forecast. But then a forecast like that is always wrong by definition as soon as it's released. It's very, very difficult to hit the bullseye in three years time because you don't know what's going to happen over those three years. Of course, and when the facts change, people have to change their mind. Right? But that's what they're trying to hit. They'll tolerate between one and a half and two and a half. Federal Reserve will actually tolerate between 1% and 3%. So there's more leeway at the Federal Reserve. So as long as it looks okay, they can leave rates alone and say, no, no, we won't do anything. But Haldane was there saying that in 2021 says, a big risk of significant inflation here, uh, and we'll have to act. And he wanted to raise rates quicker than the others did. Had we raised rates faster and followed what Haldane had said, right, we wouldn't have had to put rates up as far as we did, ultimately, it might have been a different story. Aside from anything Else it wouldn't have changed Russia, Ukraine, energy crisis situation and it probably wouldn't change the Liz Truss thing either. So my point is Haldane clearly showed a serious amount of skill at that point in time. And also, even though he's the chief economist at the bank of England, he wasn't scared to talk about it, which I had maximum respect for. If you look on LinkedIn for the members of the Monetary Policy Committee, you don't find many of them, unsurprisingly, because they have to be so careful about what they say, it's not worth them saying anything in the first place. The ones who do have LinkedIn accounts are dormant, essentially. They never ever say anything because they can move markets by saying things and it's not ultimately what they're trying to do other than anything else. Right. But Haldane is going to be an internal advisor to Burnham. Great news. I think that calms the guilt yields down apart from anything else. Right. Um, he also, he is a bit of a dove. He wants lower interest rates. Right. He's argued that the bank over tightened. I suppose I've sounded a bit dovish by saying that, but I'm hawkish and dovish, as is required. It's like my politics. They are not nailed to the mast. Ultimately they are fluid. They are flexible. Possible. Right. Um, as the facts change, I change my mind very much so. But Haldane is right. If they had tightened earlier, it's not necessarily a dovish thing to say. It's the amount of time you spend tighter, uh, rather than looser.

Speaker C: Summer is here At Orderly Meds. We know this time is a reminder that life is full of new beginnings. Whether you're celebrating the nice weather, starting a new chapter, planning a vacation or simply looking ahead to what's next, this season can be the perfect time to invest in yourself and your health. If you've struggled with weight loss and are curious about GLP1 medications, orderly meds can help you learn about your options. Through a simple virtual process, you can connect with licensed medical professionals who can determine whether treatment may be appropriate for you. Getting started is fast, convenient and happens online from the comfort of home. This summer, consider a new approach to feeling your best. Visit orderlymeds.com podcast to learn more. That's orderlymeds.com podcast orderlymeds.com podcast because every new season is an opportunity to take the next step forward, compounded medications are not FDA approved, eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details

Speaker B: and how that affects Things. It's a bit like the area. What I'm talking about from a mathematical perspective. Perspective is I'm talking about the area under the curve, not where the curve is today. And if we think about that, and that's all about context and history and a lot of the things I talk about all the time to try and put things into context, that's really what we should be looking at and that's really what matters. Right, so this comes back to the old election point as well. If you've got a Haldane in your ear and you take him as a serious advisor. Growth, growth, growth. That was a good agenda. Andy Haldane will be up for supporting that without a shadow of a doubt. Ergo, uh, don't change the manifesto. Ergo, don't have a general election. Um, maybe a bit of over simplification. But I think you do need to put those things into those camps. Right. But ultimately, M, you'll need a chancellor who's going to signal discipline to the markets. And that's what West Streeting would do. He's not the only one who could. Pat McFadden would be a strong signal of discipline. Discipline. I think Darren Jones would be a strong signal of discipline as well. Um, rather than a Miliband, which would tell you. Which would basically be appointing. And we're hearing from fairly centrist podcasts, obviously, very much second or third hand information that Haldane, um, sorry, that, uh, Miliband is not going to be considered as chancellor or even for one of the high offices of state because he's regarded as a net zero zealot, which is absolutely what he is. Right. He is a net zero zealot. Um, I think I probably heard that on the Spectator podcast. So you'd argue maybe it's not that centrist, but it does tend to try and get some balance in there sometimes. So I could imagine that. And isn't it zero zealot? I think most people can see that from the way net zero all costs. I mean, he said things like that. And it's not. That's not at all costs. You don't use the at all cost phrase. No, absolutely not. At all costs. Because the cost of people's lives because they're dying. No, that's not going to be acceptable, Ed, is it? So it's a silly thing to say about a net zero policy. Um, but there we go. So let's see who we get as chancellor. I would have Streeting in there as a gen. He's got to be at Odds on at the moment, about 60 likely to be shooting from what we've seen. But there's still a 40 chance is someone else. And like I say, Rachel's probably, probably holding about 5% of that. So who's the other 35? Some of the people that I've mentioned. Um, I mean, look, whose incentive is going to win here? Is it going to be the growth advisor or is it going to be the safe pair of hands? Chancellor, would Treaty and Haldane get on? I think they would. I've listened to a fair bit that both of them have said. Right. Um, one cabinet appointment could easily move the 30 year gilts and the rest of the market as well. More than a month's worth of data could. Right. But the direction of travel is very much. The bank is under political, political pressure to tolerate growth at the cost of a bit more inflation. And that's uh, actually a good move because although these idiots have issued about 25 of the new debt over the past five years as index linked, so linked to RPI inflation, utterly stupid. They clearly don't read the supplement because they wouldn't have released any linkers or maybe, uh, a small handful just to keep the subterfuge up. It would have been all nominal bonds that would have been eroded by inflation. You know, Sunak's big opportunity that he missed was to try and push that infrastructure agenda in early 2021 when interest rates were about to go negative. That's, that was the time to say Boris war bonds. And you'll always be remembered for them. And that would have placated the ego side of what Boris did. Covid bonds. Right. Pandemic war bonds. It's going to build Boris's bridges and bikes and boats and BS and all the rest of those things that Boris would have liked. Um, they had to remember a 630 billion pound infrastructure investment agenda, which without them saying it, was them saying, we're kind of sorry what we did in austerity. We know we've screwed up bits of the country, we need massive investment to drive things forward. We're now in position to borrow the money to do it. That was when we were still in the zero interest rate policy era, folks. And genuinely we could have seen 100 year bond that might have sold as half a percent coupon or something like that and had a patriotic angle to it. And let me tell you something else that would have helped if they'd made it exempt from inheritance tax. Lots and lots of people would have been interested in it as a Protection plate as a bit of a hedge, as something for the kids. Forget the life insurance policy, wang some money in those bonds. But hey, again, what do I know? Um, it's a shame. And in fairness, I wasn't talking about that at the time. Um, I did start thinking about it in late 2021. I didn't make a big song and dance about it. So I can't exactly claim the old Gary Stevenson. I knew what I was doing in the pandemic and everything I said was right. Just bear in mind, um, I watched an interview that. Because I quite like to go back and listen to some stuff from a year ago and I like to listen to some stuff that is on the other side of the fence from a lot of what I agree, what I believe in. Gary Schtick is all about inequality, but truly it only concentrated on wealth inequality, which is a bit of a nonsense, to be honest with you, because income inequality is far, far more important in terms of outcomes for people today, aside from anything else. And health inequality is also more important. So when he says he's an inequality economist, he's a liar. He's a wealth inequality clickbait campaigner is all he is. So hopefully one day I will get to hold him to account. That is on the vision board, folks. Um, Adam versus Gary, Gary versus Adam. In fact, he's one. I could probably even box because I think he's probably smaller than me. Unlike most of the other people who seem to want to get in the ring, who are a good six foot and change, who I don't fancy getting beaten up by. But anyway, I'm too old for all of that. That's only a joke, Gary. I don't want a boxing match. Um, I'd much more rather have a battle of genuine wits where actually we both use real facts and figures. I know I've lost you already because you just like to use rhetoric, so never mind.

Speaker A: Mind.

Speaker B: Anyway, um, so let's do a bit on what I'm doing right now, because I think that's why we always need that. So what? In anything we do, um, there's no point doing all the supplement all the time. Why do I do it? You know, just to revise that bit. I do it because it helps me organize my thoughts. It gives me a bit of accountability to the people that read it on a weekly basis. It gives me their feedback, it brings me new context. People who I would never know if I hadn't written the supplement are in my network I'm friends with, I do business with it's fantastically useful but really, really it started from me organizing my thoughts. It'd been a bit of an introspective, selfish journey to an extent and then putting them out there to share them with people. Um, and it's gone great gun since then. I'm very, very glad that I do it. So what am I doing at the moment with the information that I believe, with the analysis that I produce, I believe should be being done? Um, well, I look at these quoted versus effective rates as a bit of a calendar. I'm looking at my quarter four refinances now. I don't have a huge plethora of these luckily because of that big break up to June 24th when I fixed my mortgages back in 21 and 22. So I've got a few coming in in quarter four this year and then a lot more in 2027. And some of those I have been selling off over the years and paying the early repayment charges again. And you must be thinking, mate, you're completely nuts. You're the bank's best customer ever. But it's stuff that I really felt that I knew would never make the rent increase it needed to make to hit the yield hurdles that it would need to hit in order for me to hold on to that property. My portfolio does not carry dogs. Right. It doesn't carry 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 20, 25% of properties that don't cash flow positively.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker B: I think that's a luxury that I don't believe I can afford. The other side of the fence is I buy very well and sell with a reasonable amount of skill and a slightly above average amount of skill, I dare say. So the good, the good days for my balance sheet when we're buying because we're going to stack stuff on the balance sheet straight away. Aside from anything else when we sell, obviously there's always taxation to consider, but all depends on your own personal tax position, uh, or more likely your limited companies taxation position aside from anything else. And it's one thing buying properties with the express intention of selling them in the first place. It's another thing buying properties for investments and then changing your mind, changing your strategy when the facts change, I change my mind and selling them further down the line. So it can depend they might, may or may not be offset by anything. So remember, I'm not a tax advisor but the one piece of uh, a takeaway there for everybody is don't view ERCs as some kind of hard blocker, early repayment charges. They're a cost of doing business. They are what they are. They're what enables the bank to actually put the money out there at a very competitive rate. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very few of us would lend our money out at the same rate that a bank offers on a mortgage on a property. Right. And none of us want to be repossessing those properties if people don't pay anyway. I'm sure. But the reason why they can make money is their arrangement fees and, um, other fees around things like arrears. And when you drop off that fixed mortgage, if you haven't got another one sorted out, that's another thing they can do which helps them out. Um, it's part of what, what their business looks like. Um, and that's where they're going to make their, their margin, really, apart from anything else. The other place is the early repayment charges. So all just cost of doing business amortized across the portfolio. If you've got stuff that's not going to be working, I think we'll see the market get steadier, go back to surpassing, because remember, we're just a little bit below where we were in 24, but quite comfortably better than 23 at the moment, at this time of year, just based on June's figures at the moment. But it is real time, so it has to try and be as real time as possible. There's no crash in the market. I've seen a few. The usual suspects will probably have to name Charlie Lambdin as one of those usual suspects. Here comes the crash, here comes the pain, blah, blah, blah. Things have fallen off a cliff. No, Charlie, they haven't. You know, the market went down about 2% in 2023. That's the office for National Statistics, who have all the figures of all the house sales prices in the UK. Um, 2% doesn't really feel like a cliff edge. They went up 4% in 2024. As I say, we're close to the 24 market than we were to 23. My number is still in and around the 2% number for capital growth this year. Another bit of a struggle. Is it a Runway towards a better year? Well, it depends if we have some stability. And that is as it is these days, geopolitically as well. It is as well as it is domestically, um, this sort of bond meltdown. Bond market meltdown that Farage refers to that Liam Halligan is a big fan of. Um, again, I just think it's clickbait, folks. I'm afraid I Mean, I'm sure Liam Halligan probably does believe that. Uh, but what's the trigger for that meltdown? As I've just said, all we paid last year, 110 billion. Huge amount of money. Basically inflation. And basically we can borrow the money to pay it now. Ponzi scheme, yes, I would agree with that. But Ponzi scheme, that's near its end, that's near its final point, has to borrow three times as much as it's paying out because it's got so many redemptions from people. No, it's not that it's quite steady. UK government bonds offer an excellent return actually at the moment for national and international investors, especially compared to some other parts of the world. That's the reality of it. Right, so pricing my quarter four refinancing events now to see if I need to want to get anything on. On the market for sale. Just, um, going to pause a sec. Got a good looking comment there from Jack. Thank you, Jack, for commenting. Um, is now a time to stop and wait for the dust to settle or is the uncertainty presenting the opportunity to buy at deeper discounts? Well, I'm pretty predictable in these situations, Jack, to be honest with you. I always say the same sorts of things whenever there's uncertainty. The traders always tell me, buy the rumor, sell the fact. Right. And where are the rumors at the moment? A bit of uncertainty because of streeting. If he is the Chancellor, he said he's going to put capital gains tax up to match income tax. What a disaster. Except it wouldn't be a disaster because what would also happen is they would reintroduce indexation relief, for example, which probably would make things a lot less painful than it otherwise would have been because it would take down the corporation tax bill if you're selling assets before. Or it would be applied to the value of the shares, um, in terms of the purchasing, buying and selling that you've done. So I wouldn't be waiting at the moment for the dust to settle. I think we know now we've got a trajectory downwards in the mortgage yields. It will drift back down to 4% ish by the end of this year on the basis that Middle east stuff is over and there aren't any other major geopolitical conflicts, which is a big shout these days because there's a good 30 or 40 chance of something else happening before the end of the year. Let's face it, you really wouldn't want to bet against it. I don't feel like it's odds on, but it feels it feels a chunky probability, but there's definitely, uh, a lot of stuff available at the moment, stuff people want to get rid of. The market hasn't yet learned how to price apart from, from anything else. Uh, a rented, uh, an existing rental, an auction or whatever. There's so many that go in. No epc, no eicr, uh, no gas safe, no AST as it was then, which is now the apt, of course. Right. Hasn't got any of those things. So how do you price that? Well, I'll tell you how you price it straight away. There's a potential two year rent repayment order immediately apart from anything else, so that needs pricing in. Now a few people aren't looking at it like that. They don't really understand the new rules. I don't suppose if they're not looking at like that, they will do. And then that that market, which already trades a significant discount tenanted property through auction as a general rule, will trade at an even bigger discount. But that's the sort of thing, Jack, you can use if you're talking to vendors or talking to agents, brokers who are operating on behalf of vendors, you can use that in real time to walk the price down correctly so writes a fair, completely transparent and accurate version of events at the moment. And that will also vendors will be more keen to sell when they realize some of this stuff. So I've still not seen loads in the industry press. I don't know if anybody else has seen anything. I still haven't seen lots of stuff about, um, court cases on the back of rra. And look, it's early, this is early days and we know how jammed up the court system is. Um, I haven't seen too much about what's been going on with fines, civil penalties that are being issued by councils. Um, we will see more and more of that because obviously they're extremely hungry for the revenue and they just think the landlords have got a target on their back apart from anything else. So what's the moral of the story there? Do your compliance properly. But there's some really good deals out there at the moment. We've got tons of offers out there in the market. We are being, we are pricing out at around about 60, 65 pence in the pound at the moment. So we're not doing tons of volume as you can imagine, at 65p, but we're doing more than none. Right. And we're happy with what we are doing. Um, the ship is pretty steady at the moment. The, the deals are coming in and I think over the next six months we'll do more deals, not fewer deals. Now that's really nicely segment me into. Ugh.

Speaker F: Uh, I barely got any sleep last night. What? Why? I spent hours fighting with AI all because I was trying to make a website. It started out okay, but then I got stuck just trying to change one button. Okay, okay, relax. Just try WIX Harmony. What's that? It's wix's new website builder. Lets you switch back and forth between AI tools and hands on editing anytime. So I'm not just prompting and praying? Nope. Just try it for free@wix.com Harmony the

Speaker B: land value tax situation. Because Burnham is known as being a fan of land value tax. Well, I'm going to say something you're not going to hear anybody else say at the moment. And um, maybe this is the economist in me as well. Every economist I've known who looks at this stuff is a huge, huge fan of land value tax. The argument is land doesn't move. So it doesn't matter if you go to Dubai, other destinations are available, especially these days. Of course you still have to pay that land value tax on the land in the UK that the property is on. Perhaps around about half a percent of the value of the property every year. Disaster. 710 units I'm holding. You might wonder why I haven't got a black armband on the England shirt, uh, at the moment if that was to happen. Well, that's 350 grand a year. It's not a funny amount of money to throw away. Having said that a, I'm fairly convinced there would have to be mitigation for people who've paid stamp duty in the last X number of years. If it was me and I was designing the policy, I would give people a break based on the stamp that they paid. So if you paid 5% additional stamp, which means you bought property between 40 and 125k in the UK, you'd have 10 years before a half a percent a year land value tax would kick in. Right. It'll put the cost of renting up. Yeah, it will, it will. All these things do. It will be passed on towards the tenant. But the landlord will swallow some of it. Probably in that case, 40, maybe even 60% of it's swallowed by the landlord. Rent increases will be able to work it away. So why would I be in remotely in favor? Well, number one, because I don't just talk my own book and I don't just talk about what's good for Me, I'm genuinely interested in what's good for the nation and I'm also interested in what's happening rather than praying for rain and sitting there crossing my fingers in a dark room or whatever. Right, so the, the second part of that ultimately is it could happen, could be implemented and if it did, can you imagine what would happen in terms of deals and the marketplace? Right. It would be unbelievable in terms of the amount of opportunity that it would create because people would be selling in an absolute panic at, ah, the thought of half a percent a year, even though in reality in a. Let's be really, really miserable and say property's only going to go up at 2% a year over the next 40 years on average. That is so miserable. But let's stick with 2%. Right? Well, 25, that has been taxed away from you at the time in the cash flow in reality. Right. Where does it put real pressure on places that are already not yielding enough because it's more money to find? Where does it absolutely cripple the private rental sector? Uh, London. Right. But London's going to be difficult because if the leaseholder going to be liable for the land value tax. Well, it's land, isn't it? So actually the freehold is going to be liable. Oh, goodness me. Already government not very popular with the freeholders of late, although obviously it was Michael Gove's doing in terms of the leasehold and Common Hold Reform Act. Common, um, hold's a nightmare by the way, especially on low value units. Got lots of experience of it in Scotland. Doesn't solve the problem. This doesn't. But it is a difficult problem to solve really. This is a classic. What would you do in this situation then, mate? Somewhat different from what they've done. But you need to, apart from the else, legislate the local authorities, get involved as arbitrators. So there's a huge cost to this stuff that's borne by the taxpayer. If there's a cost, there needs to be a tax that pays for it. That might be land value tax apart from anything else. Right. So then you might say to me, was he on top of council tax? Yeah, it would be. Folks, I'm afraid most developed economies have some kind of land value tax. In the states, I believe it changes state by state, but in some places they do it based on the value of the property when you bought it. So that evidence is the value. Right. So that jams people up because if you moved in 30 years ago and paid $30,000 for your house, right, and now it's worth $2 million today or that's probably a bit of an extreme example, but you know what I mean. Then you're paying the land value tax on, they call it property taxes over there, but you're paying the land value tax on the 30k. If you moved and downsized to a million dollar property your annual bill would go up massively. Right now there is a potentially big cruel part of this of let's call it nudging because that's what economists do, they call it nudging behavior. You could be nudging people towards moving out when they haven't got much income anymore, AKA when they're retired, freeing up uh, three and four bedroom properties that people don't need in anymore that they're rattling around in. There's an ethical consideration behind all of that. Not a lot of people will like what I've just said, but that is the reality and that might help with some of the housing needs that uh, are mentioned. And please don't leave comments about freeing up for migrants or something like that. This um, is very, very little to do with immigration in terms of what's been going on. So let me just tell you about our property business workshop that's going on next week in central London. We're running a whole day workshop on due diligence. The this talks about due diligence on deals, it talks about due diligence on potential joint venture partners. It talks about the due diligence that people will do on you apart from anything else. Right. Fantastic day out. Uh, if you do think about coming along, the link is in the show notes. Google property business workshop 11 uh, if you fancy coming along, get yourselves a VIP dinner ticket because it's the only chance you get to get. Grab some quality time with Rod and myself at any sort of length. Um, and we always get great things out of those dinners. Everyone gets a chance at dinner to talk about what's going on in their business, any blockers that they've got, uh, in a safe environment with Chatham House rules. So if you can make it folks, Central London PBW 11 Google Property Business Workshop 11 link in the show notes. Like to see some people there. Thank you. Okay, what have we talked about deep dive wise as we uh, segue through the very recent political stuff that we've been talking about. Um, big fan of the good landlords charter sort of thing. Uh, we've already, we've already got this national landlord register. Someone said that the other day. I thought you don't even know what's going on. It's, it's going to be brought in at some point, goodness knows when, goodness knows what it will involve. It'll be a mess because these things always are rent smart whales. That should really be called rent stupid whales really in terms of the way that the whole thing operates. Right. Um, looks like we might have dodged Rainer in a particularly senior position, doesn't it? Apart from anything else with where we are very keen on, on the Haldane appointment, apart from anything else. But I still feel like now is the time to keep your loans values down. So we're still refinancing to 75 but we're being very cautious about anything we re refinance um, after a five year cycle is up and our LTV is sitting about 57% in the group. I have a target of getting that down to under 50% within five years. Some of that will be growth related, some of that will be selling assets related. A real shift in the strategy. But that's the world of 6% or 5 and a half percent mortgage interest rates that we probably uh, are back into. Right. Um, Now Resolution foundation report which I summarized 12.9 million renters. So a fifth of the country are pressed against an affordability ceiling at the moment. That's about five and a half million rental units with the average household size in there. Average rental household is bigger than the average owner occupier household, um, for a whole variety of reasons which you can work out. And then ultimately, um, I also wrote a piece about 10 year anniversary of Brexit which you can look up on my LinkedIn, um, which focused on the construction visa, ah side of things where we needed to import about 62,000 construction workers and we issued 1600 visas to do that last year. So makes an utter mockery of the 300 visa thousand homes a year target. Even if you ignore the viability issues there are with all of that and the planning and all the rest of it. Right. Um, so you know we are where we are, um, built to rent stock of about 62000 in London against 5.2 million households in the PRS in the United Kingdom, uh, as a house builders federation. And there's a raft of reports about all of this sort of stuff. Big issues on that front in terms of how many units are being built. London's already started to consider concede Sadiq Khan has conceded in terms of crazy affordable housing requirements because no housing means no affordable housing. And someone has finally pointed that out to him. It's not just what the developers were saying, it's what's actually happened aside from anything else. Right, um, so what am I doing right now? Refurbing some multi unit freehold blocks with tenants who are over 40 in mind. They're steady, often one bed flats, smaller blocks, maybe blocks of 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 depending on fire risk, depending on uh, I'm staying away from high risk buildings apart from anything else. That's all just getting worse and worse. But you still gotta have your fire risk assessments and all the rest of it. But the over 65 renting cohort will treble before 2040. That's the prediction. So this is pre, uh, any sort of assisted living or senior living or anything like that. It's still free and open living, uh, for people who are M mobile generally speaking, apart from anything else. But they're also steady, they've been through the crazy points in their life, um, and they're not necessarily doing anything like splitting up with people, having children, blah blah blah. Obviously that's a broad generalization but generally speaking it is also true because stereotypes come from somewhere ultimately. Right, so um, remember on these I don't do live underwriting of deals, helping out with individual things, things like that. If you want that sort of stuff, do try and make sure you make it to the workshop apart from anything else. But look, there's still a massive shortage of two and three bed terraces and semis. Um, it's been 15 years getting worse that I've been in property. Investing in property is not a guaranteed win. Uh, you want undervalued, you want sexy on the spreadsheet, you want strong yields and you want stuff below replacement cost because then people can't build comparable housing apart from anything else. Right, so new prime minister, same fundamentals, same approach. Guess what I'm m going to say to close? Keep calm and carry on folks. See you next time. Thanks for joining.

Speaker C: Summer is here at Orderly Meds. We know this time is a reminder that life is full of new beginnings. Whether you're celebrating the nice weather, starting a new chapter, planning a vacation, or simply looking ahead to what's next, this season can be the perfect time to invest in yourself and your health. If you've struggled with weight loss and are curious about GLP1 medications, orderly meds can help you learn about your options. Through a simple virtual process, you can connect with licensed medical professionals who can determine whether treatment may be appropriate for you. Getting started is fast, convenient and happens online from the comfort of home. This summer, consider a new approach to feeling your best. Visit orderlymeds.com podcast to learn more. That's orderlymeds.com podcast orderlymeds.com podcast because every new season is an opportunity to take the next step forward. Compounded medications are not FDA approved, eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details.

Speaker E: You know what I realized the hardest part about building a website isn't making it look good, it's getting what's in my head onto the page. But I've been playing with the new WIX Harmony editor and I'm impressed. You can literally just tell it what you want, or if you're picky like me, jump in and move things around yourself. The nice part is you can hop between AI and hands on editing, so you end up with a site that actually looks the way you pictured it. Try it out for free@wix.com Harmony.