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Welcome to your weekly briefing on important things affecting the housing market.

As a subscriber, the facts hit your inbox first. BUT it is always worth tuning into the live stream, as there may be a couple of last-minute additions. Find the live stream here:

Remember: If you’ve recently rented, bought or sold a home, please report your price to the BestAgent Public House Price Index.

This week’s top 5 housing market facts:

1. Mansion Tax hits hard for people who have invested life savings into home improvements https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/house-prices/poured-money-into-my-house-mansion-tax/

2. After a long slow trickle down, fixed rate mortgages now cheapest in over 3 years. https://thenegotiator.co.uk/news/uk-housing-market-news/fixed-rate-mortgages-now-cheapest-in-over-three-years/

3. Barclays reports biggest cut in consumer spending since the pandemic, signalling fears around job security https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/09/uk-households-cut-spending-fastest-pace-barclays

4. Zoopla rental report shows market slowing significantly on a national basis, but rents still unaffordable where they’re most needed. https://business.zoopla.co.uk/rental-market-report

5. RICS final monthly survey of 2025 downbeat for prices and activity https://www.rics.org/content/dam/ricsglobal/documents/market-surveys/uk-residential-market-survey/UK-Residential-Market-Survey-November-2025.pdf

Charlie's Thought of the Week:

This week the government released its long awaited “Homelessness Strategy.”

You’d have thought that might make one of the 5 Facts this week, but the fact it doesn’t is what has provoked my thought this week. (Read my quick take on it here).

It’s a huge, verbose document, full of platitudes (and, to be fair, some good measures) but the entire strategy hinges on their cornerstone assumption that they will build 1.5m homes in this parliament.

So, notwithstanding some important smaller measures which I welcome, the overall plan is a(nother) government dud, like the last ones from previous governments, too.

I’m not singling out Labour, just pointing out that this seems to be a perennial nightmare for all governments and they all seem incapable of fixing it.

Which brings me on to my point: If they can’t fix homelessness, what chance do they have of fixing the housing market? The answer is close to zero.

And that’s why it’s left to us, the private sector, to have a go. 

To my knowledge, the BestAgent project (my Bootstrapped Baby of the last 10 years) is the only such effort to address the entire housing market problem holistically. 

The list of problems is long, but the biggest one is the elephant in the room that neither the industry nor government will even acknowledge: Overvaluing. 

This can’t be stopped, but what can be stopped is the contract clause in estate agents terms of business than enables it: The Long Sole Agency Contract.

12, 16, 20 sometimes even 26 weeks (as in the case of Connells).

This, for reasons I won’t go into here, is the number one addressable cause of house moving taking so long, and being so stressful.

And we can change it. 

Remember the phrase “6 week see saw”. It’s the silver bullet I’m preparing to fire at the backbone of the housing market’s problems. 

If an agent can’t tie you in for too long, then they can’t overvalue. It’s that simple. 

Watch this space. It will be fun, rattle all the right cages, and be the first big step towards housing market transparency probably ever.

Have a great weekend.

Charlie

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Have a great weekend, lots of love and luck to you all.

Charlie