Hotspots are bucking housing stats
Property hotspots across the country are bucking an overall downward trend in house sales, data from Revenue and Customs has suggested.
HMRC data published on 24 June revealed that 98,540 homes were sold in May, up slightly from the previous month, but lower than 101,710 sold year-on-year.
According to the data, this is still far off the 1.7m homes sold in 2006, at the height of the property boom, which fell to 848,000 in 2009.
In May, data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders suggested that mortgage lending was still rising, if slowly. There was an increase of 2 per cent to an estimated total of £16.2bn in May, compared to the previous month.
However, this was still 3 per cent lower than the £16.8bn of lending undertaken in May 2014, leading CML economist Mohammad Jamei to suggest that a modest recovery was on the horizon, despite there being “affordability constraints”.
Yet individual areas have shown strong rises. According to United Home Services’s comparison site, there were strong sale figures in hotspots such as Bristol, Reading and London.
The average sale price in Bristol was £230,000, while in Reading sellers could expect an average of £289,475, thanks partly to the Crossrail development, which is set to connect London and the South East in 2018.
Activity in prime London has remained steady, with an average asking price of £950,000, while outer London transactions are completed on average in 43 days at an average asking price of £499,995.
However markets in Wales and Liverpool showed signs of slowdown. Sellers of homes in Wales were getting an average asking price of £169,500, while in Liverpool sellers got £115,000.
Paul Broadhead, head of mortgage policy at the Building Societies Association, said: “People’s optimism in the market is reasonably good, so we should not read too much into the figures.
“We do not have a single housing market but have lots of different ones with different pressures and challenges.
“The issue comes down to the actual buyer getting the deposit to buy a house. The solution is to have a coherent strategy in place to have new houses near transport links and infrastructure.”
Adviser View
Kevin Dunn, senior partner and mortgage adviser at Leicestershire-based Furnley House, said: “I would not read too much into any data.
“Statistics can be subjective, and can be used to say what you want, but I would not be concerned by them. We are certainly busy with lots of sales.”
