Fewer people are selling in Southend!

 

 

 

I know that time flies but, it’s almost three months since the General Election and it seems that we are now getting 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 Southend; solicitors, conveyancers and, one the best sources of info – the chap who puts all the estate agent and letting boards up in Southend, and all of them, every last one of them told me that they didn’t see any significant market change in the couple of month’s leading up to the Election.

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 Burton and the surrounding villages, there have been no properties sold above £2,000,000 mark in the last 15 years and only five above £1,000,000!

In a nutshell, the General Election in Southend didn’t really have any impact on people’s confidence to buy property. As I write this article, of 522 properties that have come on to the market in Southend  since the 2^nd of April, 197 of them have a buyer and are sold subject to contract, that’s nearly one in three – 30.06% to be precise.

I think that things are starting to change in the way people in Southend, 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 3 bed semi and repeated to the process, until you found yourself in  large 4 bed detached house with a large mortgage. Ring any bells!

Looking into this a little deeper, as I have said in previous articles, Southend people’s attitude to home ownership itself has changed over the last ten years. The pressure for people to buy when they are young has gone as renting, not buying, is considered the norm for 20 something’s now. This isn’t just a Southend 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 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 Southend compared to last decade. For example, in February 2015, only 56 properties were sold in Southend. Compare this February 2002, and 97 properties sold and the same month in 2003, 119 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 Southend 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 Southend, year on year, without the massive peaks and troughs we saw in the late 1980’s and mid/late 2000’s might just be the thing that the Southend property market needs in the long term.