Wellingborough Property Market Update – October 2023

With three quarters of the year having passed (already!), we have a good amount of data on Wellingborough’s property market to look back at and hypothesise about what may happen in the coming months.

The average asking of all properties for sale in September was £278,488.

This is £10,263 (3.8%) more than in the same month of 2022 and a whopping £62,904 (29.2%) higher than January 2021 (when I first started collating the data), so the market ‘crash’ that has been reported in the media doesn’t seem to have occurred. In fact, the 693 properties for sale in Wellingborough last month had a combined asking price of £192,992,184, the highest I have on my records.

Asking prices of properties that are for sale are seemingly levelling out, but I’m not entirely sure the same can be said for the asking prices of sold properties where there appears to be a downward trend. For those of you who follow stock and share prices, you may notice this is a falling wedge pattern, and these patterns GENERALLY have a bounce back and prices rise (not that I profess to be an expert!).

Will this happen? I’m not sure as the housing market is very different to stocks and shares. Moving home is usually a personal matter. The need for more or less space, a move to for a new job or relationship, or a myriad of other reasons that aren’t purely financially motivated.

But of course, finances do play their part in the decision making process. As it stands, the average difference between the asking price of newly listed properties and sold properties stands at £69,940 (29.3%) and it doesn’t seem that price reductions will reduce that deficit either.

It would suggest to me that the market isn’t completely settled, and vendors are being a little more optimistic with price reductions hoping to get closer to their asking prices.

With the recent news that the Bank of England voted to leave interest rates unchanged, mortgage rates fell slightly giving buyers a little more power.

Inflation is also reducing and we are all hoping that energy prices will be lower this winter and beyond.

All combined could see more buyers able to enter the market and raise demand.

If, however, asking prices were to fall by 5%, they would be £264,564 (approximately the same as they were in August and September last year)

If they were to fall 10%, they would be £250,639 (equivalent to November 2021 prices)

Lettings

The average asking rent in Wellingborough fell from £905 in August to £893 in September.

This is only a month-to-month fall, as it is an increase of £92 (11.5%) from the same month last year and £190 (27%) from when I started collating the data in January 2021.

Aneisha Beveridge, the Head of Research at Hamptons, has stated that the Bank of England’s efforts to combat inflation have had a more pronounced impact on the rental sector compared to other segments of the housing market. She emphasized that a combination of persistent long-term supply challenges and escalating expenses for landlords is exerting upward pressure on rental rates. Beveridge anticipates that these pressures are unlikely to diminish in the near future, leading to a continued increase in rents over the coming years.

According to Hamptons, the average rent for newly leased properties in Great Britain surged by 9.9% in July. This marked the 27th consecutive month in which rental growth exceeded 5%. Despite the affordability challenges faced by tenants, the ongoing shortage of available rental properties, along with rising costs for landlords, will persist in driving rental rates upward.

The company reported a 43% decrease in the number of rental homes available in Great Britain in July compared to the same month in 2019. Additionally, since 68% of landlords in the private rental sector (PRS) have some form of financing for their buy-to-let properties, fluctuations in interest rates will play a crucial role in determining rental prices.

Hamptons predicts that larger increases in rental rates for this and the following year will occur as landlords transition from fixed-term buy-to-let mortgage deals to substantially higher mortgage payments. Consequently, the average monthly rent for homes in Great Britain is expected to reach £1,550, representing a £333 increase compared to December 2022.

*All data sourced from Zoopla Pro