The plan to switch locations comes at a time when London’s finances are under pressure.
It is hoped the move will help authorities save millions of pounds.
U.K. house prices grew by 5.2% in August compared to the same month last year.
Month-on-month prices rose 1.6% from July to August.
The price of the average U.K. house hit £245,747 ($324,241).
Mortgage applications to purchase a home rose 4% last week from the previous week and were a remarkable 21% higher than a year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
That was the ninth consecutive week of gains and the highest volume in more than 11 years.
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages decreased to 3.30% from 3.38%.
Manhattan apartment sales in the second quarter fell by 54%, the largest percentage decline in 30 years, according to a report from Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman.
The median sales price fell 18% to $1 million, which is the biggest decline in a decade.
There were only 1,147 sales in the quarter — the lowest number on record, according to Compass.
The average mortgage shopper may see rates on the 30-year fixed as much as a quarter point higher, said Matthew Graham, COO of Mortgage News Daily, which runs daily averages from lenders.
Mortgage rates loosely follow the yield on the 10-year Treasury.
“It’s going to be ugly,” Graham said. “Today is the first time since the Covid-19 market reaction settled down in March that interest rates truly have a reason to panic. Until further notice, this looks like liftoff.”
The coronavirus pandemic may have brought most of the global property market to a standstill but in Sweden, which never fully went into lockdown, a village has gone up for sale for 70 million Swedish krona ($7.3 million).
The coronavirus pandemic has made us all a lot more familiar with our homes. But it has also thrown up a great number of questions over the future of the property market.
While global markets were thrown into turmoil in the early days of the outbreak, the property market, broadly speaking, has remained resilient. As of April, the median U.S. house price rose 8% year on year to hit $280,600.
Some hosts are building their own booking services. Others are banding together to form new, host-friendly services in an effort to wrest power away from Airbnb, Vrbo, HomeAway and Booking.com in the short-term rental market.
In the first two weeks of March, new listings were up 5% annually on average. By the second week of April, they were down 47%, according to realtor.com.
In early March, median list prices were up 4.4% annually on average. In the first half of April they were up just under 1%. That’s the slowest growth in seven years.
Just over 3.4 million borrowers, representing 6.4% of all mortgages outstanding, are now in forbearance plans.
That’s an increase of 477,000 loans in just one week, or a nearly 9% jump, according to Black Knight, a mortgage data and analytics firm, which is running weekly tallies.
These forbearances represent $754 billion in unpaid principal and include 5.6% of all Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans and 8.9% of all FHA/VA loans.
