No News is Good News
Journalists have a tough time. It’s their job to write stimulating articles that grab your attention and make you want to buy their newspaper. When house prices drop by 20% this makes their job easy – house prices are always a hot topic and a dramatic change in price engages most property owners.
However, when everything is ‘ok’ with no dramatic changes in price either way this makes writing news articles a lot more difficult. The occasional piece of data from a bank or a property website claiming national house prices have changed by 0.4% is hardly stimulating so gets little coverage. This leaves property owners unsure how to interpret the local market.
For the whole of 2008 the market was grim. Prices fell every month and the only buyers in the market were people that had to move. First time buyers carried on renting or living with Mum and Dad and investors kept their money in the bank. If an asset is falling in value you can hardly call it an investment! Everybody was holding back and trying to judge when the market hit rock bottom. This created a pent up demand in the market. At the same time sellers have been holding back from placing their properties onto the market, reluctant to sell at prices below their peak.
Most property experts agree that the market was at its lowest point at the start of this year. Since then we have seen a steady improvement in the number of buyers returning to the market. The combined reduced supply of properties coming onto the market with the increased demand from buyers has created a balanced market that is at its most active for two years. Prices have increased slightly from the low at the start of the year and many of the ‘bargains’ in the market have disappeared. More importantly if you place your property on the market you can expect to sell it, as long as the property price is correct (and that goes for any market) you will find a buyer in a reasonable timescale. Likewise, if you are looking to buy there are definite signs that prices are starting to increase. As most people moving home tend to sell and buy on simultaneously, it is undoubtedly an excellent market to move in.
So the property market is good. No headlines claiming dramatic changes in price or impressive statistics from the banks. In fact there are very few headlines about the property market at all. This goes to show that ‘No News is Good News’.