Well the dust has settled and the General Election seems a
distant memory, we can get back to a more normal property market, or that is
what the London
based ‘Fleet Street’ journalists would lead you to believe. You see I have been talking to many fellow
property professionals in Grantham (solicitors, conveyancers and one the best
sources of info – the chap who puts all the estate agent and letting boards up
in Grantham, and all of them, every last one of them told me they didn’t see
any change over April in business, compared to any other month on the lead up
to the Election itself.
I am now of the
opinion that maybe in the upmarket areas of Mayfair and Chelsea, the market
went into spasm with the prospect of a Labour/SNP pact with their Mansion Tax
for properties over £2,000,000, but in little old Grantham and the surrounding
villages, there haven’t been any properties sold above £2,000,000 mark in the
last 7 years , and only three above the £1,000,000 mark.
In a nutshell, the General Election in Grantham didn’t
really have any impact on people’s confidence to buy property. As I write this article, of 380 properties
that have come on to the market in Grantham
since the 2nd of April, 141 of them have a buyer and are sold
subject to contract, that’s over one in three (37.11% to be precise).
I think that things are starting to change in the way people
in Grantham (in fact the whole of the country as I talk to other agents around
the UK)
buy and sell property. Back in the
1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, the norm was to buy a terraced house as soon as you left
home and do it up. Meanwhile, property
prices had gone up, so you traded up to a 2 bed semi, then a 3 bed semi and
repeated the process, until you found yourself in large 4 bed detached house with a large
mortgage.
Looking into this a little deeper like I have said in
previous articles Grantham people’s attitude to homeownership itself has changed
over the last ten years. The pressure
for youngsters to buy when young has gone as renting, not buying, is considered
the norm for 20 something’s. This isn’t just a Grantham thing, but, a national
thing, as I have noticed that people buy property by trading up (or down)
because they need to, not because ‘it’s what people do’. This does means there are a lot less
properties on the market compared to the last decade.
A by-product of less people moving is less people selling
their property. My research shows there are a lot fewer properties each month
selling in Grantham compared to the last decade. For example, in February 2015, only 55
properties were sold in Grantham. Compare this to February 2002, and 88
properties sold and the same month in 2003, 83 properties. I repeated the exercise on different sets of years,
(comparing the same month to allow for seasonal variations) and the results were
identical if not greater.
So what does
this all mean? Demand for Grantham
property isn’t flying away, but with fewer properties for sale, it means
property prices are proving reasonably stable too. Stable, consistent and
steady growth of property values in Grantham, year on year, without the massive
peaks and troughs we saw in the late 1980’s and mid/late2000’s might just be
the thing that the Grantham property market needs in the long term.
For more thoughts on the Grantham Property Market .. visit
the Grantham Property Market Blog www.granthampropertyblog.blogspot.co.uk/
