How did the housing market perform in 2019?
For all those who own a property or are looking to buy, it’s always interesting to see how the housing market performed over the last year and what the prospects are for 2020.
For the year up to October 2019, 0.7% was the average rise in UK house prices. This makes the average price around £233,000, according to a BBC report on the UK housing market.
This also makes the growth the smallest since 2012, with London being the lowest, where the fall was 1.6% and the North East not far behind with a drop of 1.1%. Of course, this is still a better performance than 2018.
2020 forecast
House prices are expected to increase in the range of 2% in 2020, however. Some sources suggest that there has been a hiatus during 2019, as people awaited the outcome of Brexit negotiations and more latterly, the General Election. Things are expected to start moving in 2020 as a majority government is now in place and Brexit is now all but guaranteed.
For estate agents in 2019, this has meant that there was an average of 320 people per branch logged as buying houses, as opposed to 318 in 2018. Sales for each branch were around an average of 8 per month. The numbers of homebuyer’s reports purchased during the year likely stayed pretty constant. If you’re looking for a homebuyers report Berkshire has plenty of specialist providers.
The market performed consistently compared with 2018, especially given the uncertainty felt across the board.
What did it mean for the buyer?
Clearly, as the market performed consistently and the price trend moved upwards, major discounts were not a key feature of the marketplace and are not expected to be in 2020. As more first-time buyers entered the marketplace, rising home prices did not make it easy for them. As this is likely to be the same for 2020, it’s important for buyers to be able to maximise their negotiating leverage and part of their armoury will be a good homebuyer’s report. Again, if you need a homebuyers report Berkshire specialists, Sam Conveyancing could help (homebuyers report Berkshire).
So, 2020 already looks set for a higher increase than 2019 and may even confound predictions, depending on the next steps taken by the government after January’s expected exit from the EU.