Market Comment – January 2019

Firstly, January proved and beat all of my expectations amongst the normal pessimistic predictions with some of the pundits.

I read with interest in January, the top 10 property experts predictions for 2019 with between 70% and 80% with no capital growth movement, one saying a 5% increase and one saying a 5% fall, and therefore I can conclude from this by and large there will be little capital growth. Of course, this depends on geography and with predictions such as part of Scotland, Wales, Warwickshire and Cambridge to rise whilst it seems to be the consensus of opinion throughout all that I read that Central London will see little or no capital growth. I do not view this as bad news but an opportunity, and I think this optimistic view with my staff and I has been the key to our success over the last 29 years. There is always developments in the news that one could view as an influencing factor to the property market and whilst I of course do not disagree that Brexit has caused a certain amount of confusion leading to uncertainty and as I write this there is only 53 days before we are supposed to leave Europe, it is important to remember that people still need to move, whether it be new homes, growing families, first time buyers, renting or even retirement.

I have looked and analysed the hard facts in January and as a company we registered 743 new sales applicants and 877 new prospective tenants in January. I also thought it was an interesting statistic that we had a number of what we call “block viewings” whereby we had a number of people to view a property during a specific time. Two of these conducted in January had in excess of 35 people to view a property at the same time. All of this proves to me that there is still a strong and solid appetite to move. Prospective applicant levels for both sales and the rental sector were up significantly on last year and also property valuations were up 7% on January 2018.

At a time as I have mentioned where there is a cloud of Brexit uncertainty looming over us, I wanted to give you the facts of positivity and grass roots evidence that the appetite for moving is still strong. Now of course this may change and I will be the first to report back to you in my market comment at the end of February.

Kind regards,

Gary O’Hare