Well At Least It Isn't Snowing!
I don’t know if it is my age but it seems to me that the world seems to have become a place of extremes. Either it is the coldest winter for 20 years or it is the driest spring, the wettest August, the driest November, you get my drift. Even as a country we seem more extreme. If you take your lunch hour at your desk log on to the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph websites and scroll down to the comments section, you will find it hard to believe that the people posting comments on these politically polar opposites live on the same planet let alone the same country! If you want to have some real fun log on and post a comment that is diametrically opposed to whatever paper you happen to be reading on line, it’s like lighting the blue touch paper!
Property can also be a market of extremes; prices shoot up only to crash back to earth a few years later only for us to go through the whole thing again, in truth the trajectory taken over any 10 year period is generally upward. By putting my neck on the block I am obviously risking that it will chopped off but I am reasonably sure that there won’t be massive shift in the property market in any direction next year. I know that the profits of doom , Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders from the BBC, almost gleefully try to scare the living daylight out of us every evening with reports of Italy , Greece ,Portugal and Ireland defaulting. This may yet happen but I have a funny feeling that too many people have too much interest in the Euro’s survival for them not to find some solution when they absolutely have to and we have not reached that point yet.
The reason I think we will have “stability” is not because the market is recovering as such, more because in this part of the world it isn’t getting worse. The last 3 years have been pretty stable for us in Wokingham and Crowthorne, the amount of property coming to the market has risen slightly, the amount of property being sold has been about the same. Some of our competitors may say differently but independent figures pretty much support what I am saying. Why would this change? Borrowing costs are very low but available credit is low as well so getting a mortgage next year isn’t likely to get any easier than it has been this year. The amount of property being sold will also, likely, stay subdued. This second factor has 2 effects. In the Wokingham area there are still more buyers than sellers so the economics of supply and demand will likely sustain prices. Furthermore a relative lack of activity gives a sense that the market is flat, for things to take off optimism must return, lots of for sale and sold boards give people a sense of movement and nothing get things moving better than movement!!
So, more of the same is my prediction, not great but at least it isn’t’ snowing, yet!
