Tag: Sell

Dominic Parravani of Durrants looks at a new property market in the wake of the incomparable past two years.

The thing with changing property markets is that eventually we adapt to each manifestation. Changing markets are a bit like a pandemic. First they are a surprise, next, sadly, some people are harmed by the new normal, and then we learn how to handle the threat.
 
Then, just when we begin to get comfy, something happens and we have to learn all over again in a new market. This is where we are now.
 
Property market watchers, looking for signs that the post pandemic property party is over, have been on high alert for some time. But they don’t have to watch too closely as all the signs are there for anyone to see. The days of putting a property on the market at almost any price, and then exceeding that figure in a market awash with cash buyers desperate to move, are over. We may never see their like again – or, at least, not for decades. Today’s buyers are a new breed. Rising mortgage interest rates, the increasing cost of living and an uncertain and often unstable world have led to understandable caution.
 
So with what sort of new market must we become familiar? There are some interesting patterns emerging. It is becoming more of a buyers’ market. There will be a wider choice for buyers, who will feel less pressured to make their final choices. Sellers will have to become used to delay and uncertainty.
 
How often have we heard that a property’s three most essential things are location, location, location? Well in this new market those things will become price, price, price. In a market with greater choice attracting a buyer becomes more challenging. There are two ways to overcome this: correct pricing and making your home as buyer-friendly as possible – clean, tidy, decluttered, sweet-smelling and great-looking from the kerb.
 
Oh, and there is another way to succeed in selling: make sure you have an experienced estate agent who understands how to adapt to changing times and markets.
 
Finally, sellers shouldn’t despair. The post-pandemic party may be essentially over, but for sellers with a great estate agent, good housekeeping and accurate pricing there is still time for one for the road.

Dominic Parravani of Durrants takes a look at what’s important in a confusing property market.

Asked what he thought would define his premiership, Prime Minister Harold McMillan famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events”.

It is much the same with the property market. Events largely control turnover and turnover affects prices – up or down.

There are major events like world wars and global pandemics and inconveniences like fuel and food shortages, interest rate hikes and cost of living rises. But it might surprise you to learn that the events which so often drive the property market are not global or even national: they are personal. They are births, deaths, beginning cohabitation or ending cohabitation, stage of life changes, ambition, career success and career failure. These everyday events create a need or desire to move on or move in.

They will always be with us no matter what is going on in the world or which government is in power. When a government – any government – dabbles in the property market, the result is usually a massive hangover once the policy party is over.

No, the market is best left to home buyers and sellers. Right now we seem to be in a state of zero gravity. We are floating between price rises and price drops, as the lack of property for sale is counteracted by the rising cost of living, garnished with some pretty momentous global news.

Put it this way; if you wait for global events to stabilise, you will wait a long time. It’s better to let your life direct you. That way everyone knows where they are.

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.