Are fewer people are moving house in Nottinghamshire?

As the dust has now settled and the General Election seems a distant memory, we should be getting back to a ‘normal’ property market. However, I’m not quite so sure. Many of my fellow property professionals in Nottingham (solicitors, conveyancers and one the best sources of info – the board company, who puts up all the estate agency sales and lettings boards across the county) are all saying they haven’t seen much of an upturn in business compared to the months leading up to the election.

I am largely thinking that, other than the upmarket areas of London (where the market went into spasm with the prospect of Labour/SNP introducing Mansion Tax for properties over £2,000,000), most places, including Nottingham, (where there has only been two properties sold above £2,000,000 mark in the last 7 years) didn’t really see an impact in terms of buyer’s confidence. 

As I write this article, of the 876 properties that have come on to the market in Nottingham  since the 2^nd of April, only 107 of them have a buyer and are sold subject to contract. That’s around one in eight – or just 12%!

There seems to be a real change across the country regarding how the population are buying houses.  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.  Over time, as property prices generally went north, you could make your way up the ladder until you found yourself in a 4-bed detached house with a large mortgage.

Looking into this a little deeper; the pressure for youngsters to buy when young has gone, since renting, and not buying, is considered the norm for ’20 somethings’. This isn’t just a Nottingham thing, but, a national thing, as I’ve noticed that people are more often going up and down the property ladder because they need to - not because “it’s what people do”.  All this means that there are a lot less properties on the market compared to the last decade.

A by-product of less people moving is that less people are selling their property. My research shows there are a lot fewer properties each month selling in Nottingham compared to the last decade.  For example, in February 2015, only 472 properties were sold. Compare this to February 2002, where 761 properties sold, and in Feb 2003, 835 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 property isn’t flying away, but with fewer properties for sale, it means property prices are proving reasonably stable too. Slow and steady growth of property values in Nottingham, 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 Nottingham property market needs in the long term.

If you’d like to know more, please give drop me an email on jaclyn.bartlett@centrickproperty.co.uk