Record Property Transactions
It was reported in the Times on the 1st December that a staggering 97,532 property transactions were made in October (Source: Bank of England), which was nearly 6% higher than in September!
Now I’ve been a property investor for a very long time and I remember that at the market peak during the early 2000’s we were getting about 100,000 transactions per month as a normal level, so we are back to those heady days. This is extraordinary but we know that many of these transactions are from the pent up demand that has been lurking in our market for the last few years which has been released due to the stamp duty holiday and by the demand for people to live in larger, or different, homes so that they can work from home.
I doubt it will last at its current levels but pent up demand doesn’t go away overnight so it will eventually return again next year. I suspect that the end of the stamp duty holiday (31st March 2021) will stop transactions a little but it won’t be a ‘fall off the cliff’ event purely because buying or selling a house takes a few months so already some solicitors aren’t taking anymore instructions for the deadline, so the number of transactions will start to slow shortly but it’s amazing to see the market so active for now. .
