Whether or not you believe the Property Market is faring well in 2017 depends on where in the UK you live – or rather where your investment property sits.
If you’re based in the West Midlands, South-West, Liverpool and Northern Ireland, for instance, you’ll be delighted at how the value of your bricks and mortar investment has grown over the past 12 months or so. Manchester has also seen significant growth, Brooke Steel Estates have reported a rise in house prices over the last few years
Not so much if you happen to be in Greater London or the South East where you’re likely to have seen hardly any growth at all. In Inner London, particularly in the luxury market (£1 million and over), your property is even likely to have fallen in value.
But then London prices were always over-inflated and it’s the increased Stamp Duty that has mainly affected the luxury homes market.
As for the rest of the UK, despite the continued shortage of housing, the market continues to tick over and is expected to pick up in the last quarter now that the traditionally slow summer period is coming to an end.
Particular regions experiencing ‘mini property boom’
Certainly according to the Rightmove Price Index for August, the middle regions of England are currently experiencing a ‘mini housing boom’ at this moment in time.
Property values in a total of eight counties were twice the national average year on year – Northamptonshire (9.1 percent), Derbyshire (7.9 percent) and Norfolk (7.4 percent). The rise has been attributed to a house buyer transition from London to the suburbs with families, in particular, attracted to the lower prices and improved commuting times into London with HS2. A number of impressive infrastructure projects, such as those in Birmingham, have also boosted the movement.
In Northamptonshire it now takes just 48 minutes to get into Central London via Euston Station. Ten minutes further in sits Milton Keynes where prices are 20% higher than Northampton.
The best-performing areas in the South of England, according to the Rightmove report, were Kent (with an annual increase of 5.0%), Somerset (with 3.8%) and Bristol (at 3.6%).
Hackney is best-performing London borough
Hackney was the most impressive area in London with a year-on-year growth of 8.9 per cent (the borough was also 1.5 per cent up on the previous month). Redbridge, Bexley, Greenwich, Newham and Havering also performed well at 1.6 per cent above the annual national average.
Meanwhile, the Halifax house price index – issued at the beginning of September -reported that house price growth for the UK as a whole was up 2.6 per cent annually in August for the third quarter of the year. They even went as far as to say a certain ‘buoyancy’ was returning to the market, mainly due to high employment rates.
The bank’s Managing Director Russell Galley mainly attributed the rise to employment growth throughout the UK and the fact unemployment had fallen to its lowest level in more than four decades.
The Halifax put the cost of the average house price in the UK at £222,293 – slightly above the ‘high’ of December 2016 at £222,190.
