Fewer people are moving house in Southampton, what will that do to the market?

Well the dust has settled and the General Election seems a distant memory and we can get back to a more normal property market, or that is what the London based property journalists would lead you to believe.  You see I have been talking to my fellow property professionals in Southampton (solicitors, conveyancers and one of the best sources of info – the chap who puts all the estate agent and letting boards up in Southampton, and all of them, every last one of them told me they didn’t see any change over April in business, compared to any other month on the lead up to the Election itself.

Now I am of the opinion that maybe in the upmarket areas of Mayfair and Chelsea, the market died with the prospect of a Labour/SNP pact with their Mansion Tax for properties over £2,000,000, but in Southampton and the surrounding villages, there have only been three properties sold above the £2,000,000 mark in the last 5 years!

In a nutshell, the General Election in Southampton didn’t really have any impact on people’s confidence to buy property.  As I write this article, of 848 properties that have come on to the market in Southampton  since the 2^nd of April, 239 of them have a buyer and are sold subject to contract, that’s nearly one in three (28.18% to be precise). 

I think that things are starting to change in the way people in Southampton (in fact the whole of the country as I talk to other agents around the UK) buy and sell property.  Back in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, the norm was to buy a terraced house as soon as you left home and do it up.  Meanwhile, property prices had gone up, so you traded up to a 2 bed semi, then a 3 bed semi and repeated the process, until you found yourself in a large 4 bed detached house with a large mortgage.  

Looking into this a little deeper like I have said in previous articles Southampton people’s attitude to homeownership itself has changed over the last ten years.  The pressure for youngsters to buy when young has gone as renting, not buying, is considered the norm for 20 something’s. This isn’t just a Southampton thing, but, a national thing, as I have noticed that people buy property by trading up (or down) because they need to, not because ‘it’s what people do’.  This means there are a lot less properties on the market compared to the last decade.

A by-product of less people moving is less people selling their property. My research shows there are a lot fewer properties each month selling in Southampton compared to the last decade.  For example, in February 2015, only 327 properties were sold in Southampton. Compare this to February 2003, and 464 properties sold and the same month in 2004, 536 properties.  I repeated the exercise on different sets of years, (comparing the same month to allow for seasonal variations) and the results were identical if not greater.  So what does this all mean?  Well demand for Southampton property isn’t flying away, but with fewer properties for sale, it means property prices are proving reasonably stable too. 

Stable, consistent and steady growth of property values in Southampton, year on year, without the massive peaks and troughs we saw in the late 1980’s and mid/late2000’s might just be the thing that the Southampton property market needs in the long term, and I will take that any day of the week.

If you would like to chat in a little more depth on the Southampton property market please do give me a call on 023 8001 8222 or drop into the office on London Rd.