Author: @kerry

Dominic Parravani of Durrants gets ready for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations and considers what we have and have not learnt over seventy years of the property market.

This weekend, we celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. There will be parties in streets which didn’t exist when the Queen came to the throne and many that did.

In 1952 our major cities were still heavily pockmarked from second world war bombs that rained death and destruction – the type of destruction of life and property that the poor people of Ukraine experience today. Nothing, it seems, changes, just the location.

After the war, Britain had to rebuild, and the Queen saw, as many did, the giant strides made in terms of materials, technology and infrastructure that have come to play a vital part in where and how we live today. But, during the Queen’s reign, successive national and local governments have dismally failed properly to tackle housing. Today, there are too many under-insulated homes and too few new houses to satisfy demand. At a point in the property boom-and-bust cycle when interest rate rises and increasing energy and food costs might point to a softening in housing demand and, therefore, dampen property price increases, the lack of housing stock could instead sustain, at least, some upward momentum. Successive governments have also failed to address the national disgrace of our conveyancing system.

A recent political slogan is Build Back Better. We should build back better – better eco-friendly houses, especially on greenfield sites, and better and more social housing. Above all, we should build safer housing to prevent a horror like Grenfell Tower from happening again and fully compensate those leaseholders who are innocent in this scandal.

As we celebrate the seventy-year reign of a remarkable woman who could hardly have done better, we should also reflect on how we can learn from those years and determine to build better in future.

Dominic Parravani of Durrants enjoys some spring sunshine and considers whether this is a good time to buy and sell property.

There was a time when spring was the perfect season to put one’s property on the market. There were charmingly simple reasons for this. In May the trees are newly in leaf and everything seems fresh, the days are warmer and longer, and buyers often like to move in by the summer holidays or before the start of a new school year. Yes, spring has always been a perfect time to enter the property market.

Nowadays however, although the above still hold true, there are many additional and sometimes less charming reasons to trigger a sale and purchase. So why could an owner benefit by selling this spring rather than later in the year?

Kyiv might be over 1300 miles from London, but what is going on there and the longer-term ramifications of the war with Russia mean the future is uncertain. Energy and food price rises mean we can’t predict the future cost of living, and escalating interest rates mean our mortgages will be higher, but by how much? The way we work is changing. Many employers are eager for workers to get back to the office, so the five-days-a-week work-from-home idyll isn’t as much a given as it was. Covid is still a worry.

So whichever way you cut it we are surrounded by uncertainty, and the property market like any other market hates uncertainty.

The only thing we do know is what is happening today. So, if you are sitting on the fence waiting for a sign, let this be the sign. You might not have anywhere to move to yet and, yes, currently there are few properties for sale. But that is because everyone else is sitting on the same fence. However, it’s incredible how things can open up once you have made the first move. One thing is certain though, nothing will ever open up unless you do make a move.

So, is spring 2022 an excellent time to sell? It is a brilliant time to sell. First, there are all the traditional reasons to sell at this time of year. But now we think this is probably the top of a bull market, and so do most other leading estate agents. Prices could fall back a little and there probably won’t be the buying frenzy we saw last year. There will be more property on the market with which to compete. If anything should get you off the fence it’s when all the selling stars are aligned – and they are now.

Old charts printed ‘Here be dragons’ in unexplored waters. In property if you want some certainty it’s often better not to chase dragons.