What's their secret? With transactions down 25% on last year and at a two-year low in August (RICS figures), Foxtons - after a good year - continue their march. This time, a new branch in Stratford, their eighth new office since 2010 and their 32nd in total, due to open its doors on October 1.

Technorati Tags: property, real estate

The epicentre of the violence in Hackney has been around my house. Police in barricades have battled rioters outside the church 50m down my road in sporadic melees. Every local shop for miles has been shuttered. Cars and recycling bins have been set on fire. Helicopters constantly hover above, filming and surveying the unfolding damage. This is not what estate agents were referring to when they described local streets as “cosmopolitan”.

It's a short but interesting piece by the FT's Tony Tassell, and worries about the element of rioting as "spectator sport" he witnessed in Hackney, the cheering (of the rioters) as they attacked the police. Has Hackney, he asks, really changed?

Technorati Tags: property, real estate

It's going to be called Silvertree: a 24-storey tower by Richard Hywel Evans, on the Docklands waterfront with views over Royal Docks, and incorporating ground source and biomass energy and solar panels to both create power and heat water, and achieving Code for Sustainable Homes level 4. Expect 161 one, two and three-bedroom apartments when the tower's finished sometime in late 2012. Work starts in the summer.

Technorati Tags: property, real estate

Seven days to remove all Let By, Managed By and Sold By signs... that's the message in Tower Hamlets Council's latest missive to estate agents. Over at Estate Agent Today, Jamie Blake of the council is quoted thus:

Tower Hamlets will soon be welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors as part of London 2012, and we want to ensure that the borough looks its best.

So covering it where possible isn't an option?

Technorati Tags: property, real estate

Makes a change from the old converted broom cupboard story... this Manor Park garden shed, marketed as a "cosy" studio flat, at £150 a week. Particulars here.

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... Bow, Walthamstow, Clapton, Harringay, Deptford and - that old chestnut again - Tooting... apparently.

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

Developer in hot water for bulldozing historic Wanstead building [This Is London]
Glenda Jackson: Social housing policy can beat the Fascists [Independent]
Tweetlister: tweets your property [Tweetlister]
Footballers who lose on property [Realestateweb]

The Rat and Mouse - it's about your house

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

A flat in Old Ford Row, Bow is the first premises to be shut down under new Anti-Social Behaviour Order rules. The owners have apparently been terrorising their neighbours with loud music and drug taking. Now, they're not allowed to return home for three months, or they'll face up to six months jail or a £5,000 fine.

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

Angel Cottage (2a Windmill Lane) stood on the corner of Windmill Lane and Angel Lane, it was built in 1826... when Stratford was a rural area not yet connected to London by rail. It was destroyed over the weekend. Nobody - as yet - knows who was responsible. English Heritage have advised Newham Council to hand the matter over to the police.

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

The Olympics will turn us into couch potatoes, produce no long-term boost to local employment and is turning out to be the "catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment". Monbiot looks at recent Olympic history and finds a shameful track record of social cleansing. He also finds signs for our own acts of shame in Clays Lane in Newham and Waterden Crescent in Hackney... where gypsies and travelers and a long-standing allotment will be swept aside. More here.

London's poor lose out over Olympics [June 6, 2007]

Technorati Tags: London, Olympics, property, real estate