I’ve taken a look at all the figures for the recent weeks, but thought it may be best to do an end of 2020 review. Because, what we all want to do, I’m sure, is to look back on the year that was 2020?! (There’s been a lot of positives, it’s not all been bad!)

SALES

One of the highlights from 2020 has been the boom in the housing market since the markets reopened across the UK in the summer. This has led to consistently higher numbers of properties coming onto the sales marker, and then becoming SSTC, across the UK. What we’ve also seen is higher than in 2019 numbers of sales falling through, but you’d expect that with more sales being agreed in the first instance – the ratio of sales agreed to falling through it very similar to that of 2019, just with larger numbers. Interestingly though, the number of properties that are being withdrawn from the market has remained around the same volumes as on 2019. This shows the intent from sellers is extremely high and also that there are enough buyers in the market to keep sales ticking, currently.

I did touch on the drop in properties coming to the market a few weeks ago. This will hit the market soon – it’s supply and demand. Currently, there appears to be strong demand from buyers, but the supply of stock to the market is dropping. This will eventually mean that volumes of SSTC’s will also drop based on not enough properties being available on the market.

New Instructions

Sales Agreed

Fallen Through Transactions

Withdrawn from the market

RENTALS

So if we look at the rental market, we notice that the recovery from the initial lockdown (do we now call this Lockdown 1.0?) was a lot quicker than the sales market. However, it didn’t replicate the sales market in being far more buoyant than in 2019. Volumes of Rental properties coming to the market and those being Let Agreed generally topped out at around the same volume as in 2019. You’ll see on the graphs below that the trends of both New Instructions and Let Agreed rental properties followed very closely, the line of volumes from 2019.

New Instructions

Let Agreed

Overall, we’ve seen a 9.2% increase in the number of Sale transactions being agreed throughout the UK in 2020 when compared to 2019. This is quite remarkable when thinking about the market in late March through to May/June – when it was essentially closed to vendors and buyers (Lockdown 1.0). Since the housing markets have been allowed to open through the further Lockdowns and Tiering systems, the housing market has thrived. With a lot more people spending much more time inside their homes than they ever have before, and the realistic prospect of this home working being something that will long continue, consumers have been looking at making sure that they have the best home office space that they can have. There’s also been a lot of movement out of people moving out of cities.

So what will we see in 2021. Well, at TwentyCi we’re not in the market of predictions I’m afraid. But we do know there is currently one major hurdle coming up at the end of March – the end of the Stamp Duty holiday. I’m sure we’ve all seen and heard about the lobbying to have this holiday extended, even if just for transactions that are in progress. As it stands currently, any sale that is agreed today is likely to miss out on the Stamp Duty relief due to the length of time it’s currently taking to push a transaction through (mainly down to the larger than normal volumes of sales in the pipeline that conveyancers are having to deal with). Our data is currently showing average transactions time between agreeing the sale and completion being just short of 17 weeks (which would be completion being the first week in May if agreed today).

Source: TwentyCI