With cowboy builders on the rise, is it worth trying an online platform instead? Our correspondents suggest there may be pitfalls
Cowboy builders are a proliferating scourge which can drain a householder’s savings. In response, online platforms have sprung up which list “vetted” traders in response to a postcode search. But how reliable are they?
In March, I reported how AF of Brighton was left with part of her roof missing after hiring a trader to repair a leak. To ensure that she was not scammed a second time, she sought a roofer to repair the damage on Checkatrade, which promises “guaranteed” traders, “rigorous checks” and “recommendations you can rely on”.
Countryside semis are strongest-performing property type, with average price up 22% over five years
Rural areas have trumped towns and cities in house price growth over the past five years, with a semi in the countryside the top-performing property type, according to data for Great Britain.
The figures, issued by the mortgage lender Nationwide, showed that average house prices in predominantly rural areas rose by 22% over the period, compared with 17% in predominantly urban areas.
A deluge of visitors has locked locals out of the housing market - and protests are growing across the Balearics
In a hot, dusty car park within sight of Ibiza’s old town, but a world away from the Balearic island’s hedonistic clubs and bougainvillaea-fringed villas, Ami Mohamed-Ali sits in his van, patiently brewing the first of three late-afternoon cups of strong tea.
“The first glass is bitter like life,” says the 33-year-old seasonal worker from Western Sahara, quoting an old refrain. “The second is sweet, like love, and the third is soft, like death.” As he adjusts the camping stove and pours the liquid from glass to glass to ensure a decent head of foam, Mohamed-Ali ponders his living quarters without a trace of life’s bitterness. So what if this van is his home for the next six months?
OpenAI’s unsubtle approximation of the actor’s voice for its new GPT-4o software was a stark illustration of the firm’s high-handed attitude
On Monday 13 May, OpenAI livestreamed an event to launch a fancy new product – a large language model (LLM) dubbed GPT-4o – that the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, claimed to be more user-friendly and faster than boring ol’ ChatGPT. It was also more versatile, and multimodal, which is tech-speak for being able to interact in voice, text and vision. Key features of the new model, we were told, were that you could interrupt it in mid-sentence, that it had very low latency (delay in responding) and that it was sensitive to the user’s emotions.
Viewers were then treated to the customary toe-curling spectacle of “Mark and Barret”, a brace of tech bros straight out of central casting, interacting with the machine. First off, Mark confessed to being nervous, so the machine helped him to do some breathing exercises to calm his nerves. Then Barret wrote a simple equation on a piece of paper and the machine showed him how to find the value of X, after which he showed it a piece of computer code and the machine was able to deal with that too.
Candy, 51, who developed the “superluxe” Knightsbridge apartment building overlooking the royal park and acquired one of the flats for himself, said it irritated him that he was paying service charges of up to £161,000 a year (or £3,000 a week) when he was rarely there. The development has a private cinema, 21-metre lap pool, as well as sauna, gym, golf simulator, wine cellar, valet service and room service from the five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel next door.
Campaigning Labour MP knocks on doors of wealthy London homes bought by foreign leaders who are subject to sanctions
Margaret Hodge, the veteran Labour MP and former minister, is on a mission to knock on the doors of multimillion-pound London properties.
The luxury homes she is calling on are linked to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, in gated communities in Kensington, west London, and closely guarded by private security.
Netflix’s distasteful ‘reality’ series holds up a gilded mirror to the people making the city harder for the rest of us to live in
When I first arrived in London, seven years ago, I used to enjoy stopping outside estate agents’ offices and browsing the listings in the window. Though they were almost always ludicrously out of reach, there was idle pleasure to be had in seeing what you could get for £5m v £10m, and debating with yourself the merits of a home spa v home cinema.
These days, however, I find it hard to indulge in fantasy real-estate without being reminded of London’s housing crisis, and where it has landed me and many others my age: shut out of home ownership. Now a flashy new reality TV series from Netflix is seeking to take us the other side of the glass with a view into on London’s “super-prime” property market.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
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Angela Rayner to promise party will build homes on sites by end of its first term and support private developers
A Labour government would aim to announce the sites for a series of new towns within a year of taking office, with the promise that homes would be built in them by the end of a first term, Angela Rayner is to say in a speech.
Giving more detail to a plan first outlined in Keir Starmer’s party conference speech in October, Rayner will tell a housing conference that Labour will strongly support private developers who create high-quality and affordable housing.
We’re interested to hear from people under 45 in the UK who have moved to a smaller community with a lower cost of living, and how they’ve been finding it
We’re keen to hear from people under the age of 45 who have in recent years relocated to a smaller, more affordable community in the UK – whether that’s a small city, town or village.
We’d like to know why people have made such a move, how their new life has been working out, and what the positives and the negatives of living in these communities may be.
Previous £25,000 maximum no longer enough to fund some home improvements, says building society
Nationwide building society has doubled the maximum personal loan it will offer borrowers to £50,000, citing the continued increase in building costs as the reason for the change.
The society previously offered up to £25,000 for qualifying customers but said this was no longer enough to fund some home improvement projects.
Microsoft said it would invest $1.5 billion in G42, an Emirati company with ties to China, as Washington and Beijing maneuver to secure tech influence in the Persian Gulf.
Lawmakers raising national security concerns and seeking to disconnect a major Chinese firm from U.S. pharmaceutical interests have rattled the biotech industry. The firm is deeply involved in development and manufacturing of crucial therapies for cancer, cystic fibrosis, H.I.V. and other illnesses.
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