Property market updates

Since the property market reopened in May, properties sold have gone up by 50%, however was down by 31.5% compared to June's figures for last year. The demand has risen, this could be due to priorities changing, as well as the new incentives for home owners to buy properties, for example the stamp fee holiday for properties under £500,000 in England and Northern Ireland until the end of March next year. These figures will be reflective of this change next month, as currently figures from HMRC are only for June 2020. However, Rightmove have noted that within the first half an hour of the announcement of temporary stamp duty holiday, there was an increase of 22% in traffic, with record numbers of visitors to the site hitting 8.5 million users (source from Rightmove stamp duty insights 8^th July 2020 power point). At Evolution properties we have noticed an increase in enquiries, especially those between £400,000-£500,000, this could be due to the highest saving for the stamp duty, as this would be a saving of a maximum of £15,000.  This is seen from Rightmove also, with Rightmove noting a 75% increase on year-on-year buyer enquiries since the start of July already! There has been an increase also in home-owners filling out online instant valuations since May with an increase in demand in appraisals coming from this. So not only is there a pent-up demand that has been released, change of priorities, there is now an even bigger incentive to move with the stamp duty holiday.

Read more: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/news/house-price-index/

Read more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53485109

As well as this, for first time buyers, as discussed in last week's blog, there has been a reduction in first time buyer mortgage rates, from 15% to 10%, for further information on this, please see last week's blogs.

If you are curious what properties we currently have for sale and rent, please head over to: https://www.evolutionproperties.co.uk/property-search

If you would like to get in touch with us today to answer any enquiries you may have, or to put your property on the market with ourselves, please call us on 01233 501601, or email us at ashford@evolutionproperties.co.uk