Who would have possibly thought it! Covid 19 and its many variants, furlough, redundancy, the rising cost of living and even the return of Strictly Come Dancing have not halted the spiralling trajectory of our bricks and mortar.
The latest Nationwide Building Society monthly report identified a price rise of 9.9% at the end of last month! The average price of a UK house was £252,687 in November – nearly 15% higher than March 2020, when the coronavirus crisis started.
Quite ironically and born out of the genuine needs for “different” housing requirements, the driving force behind the growth seems to have been brought to being by the nothing but the pandemic itself.
Home working, relocations, “city” exodus and the stamp duty holiday expedited many latent desires to make a move now, rather than later.
Transaction rates, normally in the region of 1 million residential moves a year, shot upwards by almost 50%.
This of course drove prices upward with the issue now being the lack of stock ring fencing, for the time being, the elevated and high asking prices.
What of next year? What will happen in 2022?
I certainly can’t see and wouldn’t want to see further unsustainable growth. Interest rates will rise and mortgage deals, although always competitive, will not be able to snare you with the jaw dropping rates they once did.
Martin Beck, senior economic adviser to the EY Item Club, said that a recent decline in mortgage approvals “bodes well for the housing market avoiding a significant correction now that stamp duty has returned to its normal level”.
As always, work aside (although this is less and less the case), you spend more time at home than anywhere else.
No budget is enough, even within the upper percentile of the market. I once met with a chap who refused to pay £3.2 million because the house we were viewing did not have a tennis court.
When I asked if he enjoyed a game he replied “no, but that’s not the point! “.
Make sure you can afford the house. Price up the improvements (is that even possible these days!) and do everything you can to make you the number one choice of buyer!
Mortgage rates aside, what we do know is that making sure you are happy with your home has never been so very important or, unfortunately, so very costly.
Thank you for reading.
Mark
