With the East London property market on the road to recovery, buying houses and apartments in East London is proving fashionable again.
More home buyers and property investors are looking to invest in the East London property market, where in just two years time the 2012 Olympic Games will get underway.
The transformation of London is well and truly under way. In addition to the progress being made on the sports venues and games facilities, developers are building a number of new houses and East London apartments. Meanwhile, various transport infrastructural improvements are making good stratford office spaces progress.
Make no mistake, the Hackney London property market is currently one of the UK's top property hot spots.
Yet the supply of Hackney London properties is still falling short of growing demand, due to the fact that more people are looking for houses and apartments in London to buy.
With most East London property developers reporting a high volume of forward sales, often before ground has even broken on new build homes, house builders are competing for more land upon which to build more East London properties, particularly apartments.
The lack of East London properties - both houses and apartments - along with increasing property prices is a cause for concern for many people, as they are being priced out of the East London property market.
Two-thirds of parents with children living at home believe their offspring will not be able to afford to live locally when they leave home, due to the property shortage and high residential prices, according to a new report by the Chartered Institute of Housing.
Stewart Baseley of the Home Builders Federation, said: "House building is vital to the economy. We already have a housing shortage [nationwide] approaching a million and are building less than any time since 1923."
The recent Emergency Budget announcement by the Coalition government is unlikely to do much to increase the supply of East London properties - neither houses nor apartments - after the Chancellor George Osborne unveiled the largest package of tax increases and spending cuts in a generation.
The National Housing Federation (NHF) estimates that the housing budget could be cut by up to 32 per cent over four years.
The new build homes sector plays a big part in the East London property market today, ensuring that more people are housed and are able to get a foot on the housing ladder.
But the well documented shortage of Hackney London properties is increasing property prices in the region, which are now nearing the 2007 peak. This means that houses and apartments in London also constitute rather shrewd property investments.
But besides buying houses and apartments in New homes London at the right time, people need to buy in the right location from developers with a good track record.
East London properties - Highlights
Berkeley Homes is currently building 250 new Hackney London apartments in an appealing waterside development called Caspian Wharf located at Limehouse Cut. Additional penthouse apartments offer views of the Olympic Park to the North. Prices range from £172,500 to £1.1 million.
In Stratford itself, Thornsett Group's eye-catching contemporary design of its luxury Lett Road housing scheme makes it one of the more unique London property developments. Purchasers have a choice of apartments with one, two and three bedrooms as well as three penthouses at the top of the 12-storey block. Property prices here start from £185,000.
Paradise Park, a two-acre site built around the former Paradise Dock, is being built by Vision Homes. The development offers a selection of apartments, including 77 private apartments, 55 social apartments, around 10,000 square feet of office buildings and an underground car park.
All the new homes London apartments at Paradise Park will conform to the London Plan's demands for 20 per cent renewable energy, and will incorporate a centralised heating system, green roofs, and a large area of solar photovoltaic panels.
Elsewhere, Genesis Homes is currently offering 78 one-and two-bedroom properties at their Fairfield Quarter development just a few minutes from Bow Church station. Built in five separate residential blocks, the scheme features some of the most affordable London apartments, with 25 per cent home share costing from £41,000.
When buying houses or apartments in London, always ensure that you stay informed with all market trends by continuously analysing and researching the East London property market sector, as this will simplify the process of buying property in East London.
THE NATURE OF MEDIA
Thirty years ago, Marshall McCluhan, the father of modern
communications, wrote the immortal words, "The medium is the message."
Today I would amend that to, "The medium is the media." Our civilization is
utterly dominated by the force of media. After our own families, no influence
holds greater sway in shaping the text of our being than do the media that
cloak us like an electronic membrane.
We all think of ourselves as unique, unlike any person past or present.
Indeed, what gives human life its divine spark is the distinct quality of every
individual. Yet in many ways we are all the same. The task of market
analysts, pollsters, and demographers is to identify those characteristics we
share, and group us accordingly. If you are in your early forties, male,
Caucasian, a father of two, earn $50,000 or more, and listen to a Top 40
radio station, there are total strangers out there who know an awful lot about
you.
That's because they understand a lot about your upbringing. They know
you watched "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the fifties, "The Man From
U.N.C.L.E." in the sixties, "Saturday Night Live" in the seventies, became
environmentally conscious in the eighties, and were probably sorry ABC
canceled "Thirtysomething" in the nineties. They've got your number because
they understand the role the media have played in your life from the moment
you Boomed as a Baby.
Today, in America, we tune in to over 9,000 commercial radio stations, 1,100
television stations, 11,000 periodicals, and over 11,000 newspapers with a
combined circulation of nearly seventy million. These are the sources of our
opinions on everything from nuclear disarmament to Madonna's love life.
Nobody likes to be told what to think, but all of us, every single day, are told
precisely what to think about.
As Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson show in their insightful book, Age of
Propaganda, the mass media are most effective in terms of persuading the
public for two primary reasons. First, they teach new behavior and, second,
they let us know that certain behaviors are legitimate and appropriate. So, if
the media are encouraging certain buying patterns, fashion trends, modes of
thinking, the unstated message we receive is "It's okay for me to like that,
do that, feel that." In this way, our culture evolves, is accelerated, and
disseminated.
Like the transcontinental railroad of the last century, the media link every
city, gully, farmhouse, and mountaintop in North America. Regionalism is
fading. The American accent is more uniform; our penchant for migration
and blending in is like the smoothing out of a great national blanket. We are
fast becoming one.
A common grammatical error occurs when people say "The media is" rather
than "The media are" ("media" being the plural of medium"). Yet I sense
people who say "the media is" are on to something. They perceive the many
arms of the media-TV, newspapers, radio, etc.-as part of one monstrously
monolithic creature. The media are "one" too.
Consider "Baby Jessica" McClure, for whom my firm donated public
relations services. Jessica was the toddler from Midland, Texas, who fell down
a narrow pipe in her backyard in 1987. For thirty-six hours, America was
mesmerized by press coverage of her rescue. Acting as a concerned
neighbor, the media conveyed Jessica's light to the nation. The private agony
of the McClure family became the anguish of all America.
Think of it: the temporary suffering of one "insignificant" little girl stopped
the world's most powerful country dead in its tracks. (Then, to canonize the
experience, the TV movie version of Jessica's story made it to the small
screen within a year.)
Without those cameras there to catch it, and those TV stations to broadcast
it, Baby Jessica's ordeal would have made absolutely no impact on anyone
other than her family and those who saved her. Because of the media, all of
America for two days became part of Jessica's family.
CONTRACTION AND EXPANSION
Journalists and talk-show hosts like to claim they're in the information
business or the news business. But you know and I know they're in the
money business just like everyone else. Because practically all media are
privately held profit-making ventures, they behave much like any other
enterprise, looking for ways to increase the bottom line.
To do that they must expand their consumer base, that is, their audience.
They must give the customer what he or she wants. So if your local news
station runs a few too many five-part specials on the illicit sex lives of nuns
during