I’m sure you’re planning on when, and importantly how, to begin to return your business back to how it was before the Coronavirus pandemic and Government lockdown. We might not have a crystal ball but hopefully using some of these stats from the housing market may help.
Here’s how the sale market is currently looking, compared to the same weeks in 2019;
There’s been some small improvement in the number of properties that have agreed sales in the last week. Estate Agents are still marketing properties and offering virtual tours to viewers to try and keep sales flowing. The majority of the sales that have been agreed are at the lower end of the price spectrum with 42% of all sales on properties valued less than £200k, UK wide. This is possibly suggesting more investment sales are progressing or that key workers, who tend to be on lower incomes, are still having to carry on life as normal and that means they still need to move house for the usual reasons.
Once again, I’ve also looked at the Rental market:
Again, like sales, we’ve seen a rise in the number of Rental properties that have become Let Agreed this last week. Roughly a 35% increase week on week compared to w/c 13th April. And running at just short of 60% when compared to the same week in 2019. The Rental market is generally standing up to the Coronavirus and many companies I have spoken to assume that the Rental property market will be able to kick start their business with moves, based on the turnaround time involved in the process being a lot shorter than sales.
I was also asked a few times this week about the number of Fall Throughs there have been in the Sales market recently, week on week using the same dates as the above tables:
So as we can see, the number of fallen through property sales is lower than the same period last year. Looking at our figures, there are over 300,000 transactions that are progressing currently, many of which are being held by restrictions on the process from the Government. The current lack of transactions falling through is a plus point for the current market. I would assume that when restrictions are lifted that these will be pushed through by Estate Agents and Solicitors are quickly as possible, but then there may be a lag of new completions while waiting for buyers who haven’t been able to get out viewing while the country has been on lockdown to begin their own transactions.
Fallen through transactions may well be a great market to target for storage purposes. Depending on where the transaction is in the process, the owner may well have started to pack up their belongings. Are they likely to unpack or leave them in boxes? And if they’re left in boxes, do the consumers want the boxes out the house while searching for a new buyer?
Source: TwentyCi, MoverAlerts
