The latest Halifax index  was published last Friday and showed a decline in March of 1.7%. Whilst this appeared to contradict the Nationwide index   published the day before (which showed a 0.90% rise in March), the longer (and more statistically robust) quarterly trends are both showing that the rate of house price decline is slowing. For [...]

Press release 30 March 2009
Checkmate Mortgages Limited today announced the appointment of John Hunt to the position of Managing Director, Finance & Risk.  John immediately joins the Board and has responsibility for Finance, Risk and Compliance, reporting to Stephen Knight, Executive Chairman.
John qualified as a chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen, and as a Master Blackbelt [...]

 
Lord Turner published his eagerly awaited review and recommendations last week. Lord Turner writes in a clear and authoritative style and there is much to agree with and learn from in his report
 
 
Mortgage regulation review
 
Whilst the vast majority of the review looks at the banks and how to ensure a more robust banking system, Lord [...]

 I was reminded yet again in a meeting on Monday of the view that seems somehow to persist in certain quarters of capital markets, particularly those working either in American banks or American credit institutions generally, that UK and US are on parallel paths and that the UK is simply some 6 – 12 months [...]

 
 
By Stephen Knight, Executive Chairman Checkmate Mortgages
  
 
When Buy To Let (BTL) first appeared in the UK mortgage market it was regarded as a highly niche, commercial product requiring higher rates, lower LTVs and delivering greater risk than prime residential.  Wrong.  Take a look at this graph:
 
 

 
 
In every example, except the second half of 2008 (where [...]

 
The most notably consistent refrain of bankers and politicians over the last few months has been “I didn’t see it coming”. A perhaps rather obvious statement if you think about it, as clearly if you did and didn’t act, the charge would be incompetence rather than perhaps just oversight. The important question is of course [...]

The latest Case Schiller index (for December 2008) which tracks US house prices has recently been published and shows a picture of continuing house price declines. Although the picture at first glance would appear gloomy there are some signs of a flattening in the rate of decline.
 

 
On a month to month, seasonally adjusted basis prices [...]

 By Stephen Knight, Executive Chairman, Checkmate Mortgages

In Tudor times,  begging outside of your home town boundaries was a crime punishable by the stocks. There, to humiliate and embarrass you, local people would throw rotten tomatoes and other vegetables.
 
Some 500 years later we’ve moved on from such uncivilised punishments.  Or have we? Last week’s bankers’ Treasury [...]

Predicting the bottom of the UK housing market is fraught with difficulties to the extent that several organisations that usually provide statistics in this area have declined to provide forecasts for 2009. Predicting prices at present is nigh on impossible, partly as any view has the potential to become a self-fufilling prophecy and partly because [...]

Our full time Executive Chairman, Stephen Knight, is also non executive chairman of Cicero Consulting, a public policy advisory firm.  At a recent Cicero House of Commons breakfast meeting where Stephen, Vince Cable (Shadow Chancellor, Lib Dems) and Thomas Huertas (Director, Banking Sector, FSA) were all speakers, the article that appears as a blog below summarises [...]