Beast from the East, Russia, Facebook, Brexit, Trump, House prices up, House prices down … the Press is full of column inches on Brit’s favourite subjects of politics, scandal, weather and not forgetting (and I appreciate the irony of this!) the property market. As an agent belonging a national group of letting and estate agents, talking to my fellow property professionals from around the UK, the one thing that is immediately apparent is the UK does not have one property market. It is a hodgepodge patchwork (almost like a fly’s eye) of lots of small property markets all performing in different ways.
At the start of 2007 there were 1,797 properties for sale in Hounslow but by March 2008, when the credit crunch was really beginning to bite, that number had risen to 2,265 properties on the market at a time when demand was at an all-time low, thus creating an imbalance in the local property market…..
The value of all the homes in Hounslow has risen by more than 291% in the past two decades, to £21.665bn, meaning its worth more than the stock listed company Aviva, which is worth £20.321bn…….
…….How much Council Tax you pay depends on two variables. The first is which Council Tax Band your property is in. A property is placed into a specific band depending upon what the value of the property was in April 1991 – the date when the tax band system was applied. In a nutshell, what your property is worth today has no relevance whatsoever to your banding…….
A Hounslow landlord was asking me the other week to what effect homeownership rates in Hounslow in the early to middle aged adult age range had affected the demand for rental property in Hounslow since the Millennium. I knew anecdotally that it affected the Hounslow rental market, but I wanted some cold hard numbers to back it up. As you know, I like a challenge when it comes to the stats.. so this is what I found out for the landlord, and I’d like to share them with you as well…….
A little bit of good news this week on the Hounslow Property Market as recently released data shows that the number of first time buyers taking out their first mortgage in 2017 increased more than in any other year since the global financial crisis in 2009. The data shows there were 116 first time buyers in Hounslow, the largest number since 2006.
I expect in 2018 ……..
So, should you move somewhere larger, or extend your Hounslow property to make it large enough for you and your family? In some circumstances the choice has been made for you. If you live in an apartment with no garden, there isn’t much of an opportunity of making it larger. But if you have a house with a garden or an attic with sufficient headroom, extending your home becomes a real prospect.
So, when a landlord recently asked me why the brand-new property she was considering buying was a lot more expensive compared to a second-hand/existing property of similar type, accommodation, location and structure I thought this would make a fascinating topic to do some homework on … homework I want to share with the homeowners and landlords of Hounslow.