According to Hometrack, residential property prices in England and Wales exhibited a fall of only 0.3% during last month, this is the smallest drop in prices for more than a year. This is great news for the whole market, but does it point to the return of the Quick House Sale?

This reflects a growth in optimism from estate agents across the country, who are now experiencing increased levels of market activity. Actual residential property purchases have also progressively grown during the first months of 2009. The drop in residential property prices now comes to 10.1% in the last year.

Estate Agents have reported a continued increase in the number of potential buyers signing up with them during the last month. The increase is reported as being 6% over the last month, and 32% for the year to date. Coupled with this has been a move to more sensible pricing as owners start to accept market reality more readily. This has helped a growth in the number of actual sales transactions. Agents have reported a sales volume improvement of 15% for last month and a huge 70% for the year as a whole. But it needs to be remembered that this is from a very low base, and the buyer pressure and volume haven’t yet built up to such a level as to ensure sellers can Sell Home Fast.

In normal market conditions, when the economy is stable, there are usually between 1 million and 1.3 million residential property sales transactions per annum. Even given the current positive data set out above, it is almost impossible to forecast transaction volume exceeding 600,000 for the whole of 2009. This figure is of course 50% of typical volume, so despite the encouraging signs of recovery there remains a long way to go before the market is back to normal.

Lots of market factors are at work however. For example, there remains a lack of first time mortgage offerings from mortgage institutions. Eligibility criteria are stricter than for a long time and required deposits often as much as 25%. So despite the availability of cheaper residential property, first time buyers are still finding it hard to get onto the residential property ladder. Keeping first time buyers out of the market has a fundamental effect right up the sales chain, and will hold back transaction numbers until there is an easing of first time mortgage availability. The upside of this, however, is that many potential buyers are now choosing to rent in the short term until they have got together sufficient deposit. This has the effect of property, so investors are being pulled into the market in larger numbers than of late. This is also driven by the fact that landlords can now command rents at around 6% of residential property value, against an average 5% two years ago. This is attracting new investor buyers in, and it’s therefore the sector I’d look to in order to Sell my Property fast in the current recession, but this is unlikely to fully compensate for a lack of first time buyers.

Related posts

• No related posts.