Earlier in the week, we posted about GMAC-RFC the mortgage lender being fined £2.8m for the inappropriate handling of repossessions which led to unnecessary reposessions.  Yesterday, Which? personal finance campaigner Dominic Lindley spoke out about the length of time it took the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to issue the fine.

According to Lindley, the FSA knew about GMAC’s irresponsible behaviour as far back as mid-2008 yet took no action for over a year. As if that wasn’t bad enough for the FSA, they offered the lender a reduced fine, down from £4m, for early payment. You can read more about the story at MoneyMarketing.co.uk.

Did you catch any of the BBC Radio 4 show: Repossessions in the Sun? It was a sad tale of expats that headed abroad to find their dream home only to lose it through missed payments or (more often than not) ill thought-out purchase decisions.

One lady had owned a home in the Canary Islands but came back to England still owing a hefty mortgage on it, like many home-owners in the UK at the moment: she doesn’t like opening her post. These repossession cases are quite often down to poor advice or no advice rather than falling behind on payments and as a legal representative said: “They see the sun, they get some sangria in them, and a lot of them don’t use lawyers.”

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has handed out a £2.8m fine to mortgage lender GMAC-RFC for the inappropriate handling of repossessions. The extent of this mis-conduct has affected more than 46,000 of its customers and as a result, refunds to the tune of £7.7m, plus interest, will be handed out.

The reason for the ordered refunds, is the fact that GMAC-RFC (who recently received $5bn from the US Government) charged excessive fees and didn’t do all they could to help customers stop repossession by ignoring alternatives. The General Motors owned financial arm is a major player in the UK mortgage market and was recently the 11th largest lender according to figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders.

As is the way with the current housing market, you never quite know whether prices are up or down and it often depends on who’s set of figures are out that week. At the moment, it’s the turn of the Land Registry and they’re seeing rising house prices in September in all regions except the north-east and in Wales.

Average English and Welsh house prices rose by 0.9% in September bringing the annual rate of deflation down to 5.6%. These figures are extra incentive to do all you can to avoid repossession with London seeing biggest rise in prices, at 1.3%. Meanwhile, the average price of a property in England and Wales is up to £158,377.

Newquay – we’ve all either been there or tried to get there and broken down on the way. Those who made it will no doubt have bought an ice cream, a postcard or maybe even a house. In fact, quite a lot of well-to-do ‘city folk’ ditched the first two and just went for the latter and as a result, property prices soared. At the height of the market in 2007, properties only came in the form of luxury apartments and entered the market at anywhere between £200,000 and £800,000. Not good news for the locals with an average wage of £18,000.

Fast forward 2 years, the market is dead and Newquay has around 600 luxury properties for sale, unfinished or with planning permission. Mortgages are harder to come by, disposable incomes are down, house repossession numbers are up but still the locals can’t afford housing. It’s a problem that may take years and millions of pounds to fix.