The question I hear you asking is “how’s the UK housing market holding up in this heat then?”. Well, let’s take a look.
There’s been some small drops in the number of properties coming to the market and we’ve recently seen the number of buyers reducing the total volume of sales being agreed throughout the UK since the end of June:
When you then factor in the past 2 years for comparison purposes, you’ll see what these numbers look like against different markets:
With New Instructions, we see that the start of the year there has been fewer sellers entering the market than in 2019 and 2020. However, volumes of property coming to the market this year has remained fairly steady.
In 2020 we see the ‘Covid effect’ of massive drop off followed by the pent up market where more than usual volumes of homes went on the market for sale. These volumes dropped off towards the end of 2020 to almost match those volumes of 2019.
This graph shows the Sales Agreed volumes week by week. Again we see the ‘Covid effect’ – dropping off followed by pent up demand. What you see differently in 2021 though is that the line has almost always been above that line of 2019. This means that more sales have been agreed, and are still being agreed week on week throughout the UK than in 2019. And although volumes are dropping recently, importantly they still remain above those numbers in 2019.
There are still a lot of buyers in the process of buying a new home who will be completing later this year. If you think about the timescales involved in the conveyancing of a transaction being around 20 weeks at present, then any sale agreed today on the 22nd July isn’t likely to be completing until around the middle of December – yes, just before Christmas (sorry for mentioning the C word in July!).
Source: TwentyCi
