June 2024 – Property Market Comment with Richard

Welcome to the June 2024 Property Market Comment.

And if you are wondering if news of next month’s election has had much influence over the UK housing market, the answers is no. We Brits appear to quite blasé about these things if a pandemic and talk of various wars can’t hold us back, then why should an election? In the past of course, the
political parties had substantially different policies, so the outcome of the election had a huge bearing on people’s appetite for a house move.

This time around however, in the scramble to secure votes, both the major parties are offering property related incentives: the Conservatives are promising to freeze Stamp Duty, Capital Gains Tax and Council tax, whilst the Labour party, currently favourites to win, are promising to offer a mortgage guarantee that they claim will enable over 80,000 young people to buy their first home, rather than renting.

So there is nothing scary expected from the election, and fortunately it’s only next month, so, unlike some elections in the past, there is no protracted period of uncertainty affecting the property market. In fact, since December, property sales values have risen by a whopping 5.1%, although this is more likely to be higher-end properties having reduced their price substantially in order to achieve a sale.

Across the UK properties are actually taking 7% longer to sell than they were this time last year, and 80% of those properties were sold below as king price. And there are about 18% more properties coming to market too.

But a good indicator of the state of the market is to assess the relationship between sales agreed against accumulative property available for sale.

This has now settled from the heady heights of the inflated pandemic market which saw the number of sales arranged at 98% of property for sale and, since the beginning of the year, this has settled to around 69% – the long-term average being 70% so you could say that we’re back to about as normal a market as one could expect.

So if a sale looks like it could be on your manifesto in the coming weeks, then why not vote for us to help you with your move.

You might be pleasantly surprised! Book your valuation here online.