In the credit crunch of 2008/9 the rate of home moving plunged to its lowest level ever. In 2009 the rate at which a typical house would change hands slumped to only once every 20 years. The biggest reason being that confidence was low and many homeowners didn’t want to sell their home as Bexhill property prices plunged after the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. However, since 2009, the rate of home moving has increased (see the table and graph below), meaning today:The

My thoughts to the landlords and homeowners of Bexhill… The tightrope of being a Bexhill buy-to-let landlord is a balancing act many do well at. Talking to several Bexhill landlords, they are very conscious of their tenants’ capacity and ability to pay the rent and their own need to raise rents on their rental properties (as Government figure shows ‘real pay’ has dropped 1% in the last six months). Evidence does however suggest many landlords feel more assured than they were

Recently I was having a chat with one of my second cousins at a big family get-together. The last time I had seen them their children were in their early teens. Now their children are all grown up, have partners, dogs and children. Wow – how time flies! So, I got talking over a glass of lemonade with my 2nd cousins and a couple of their children, about the times of 15% interest rates and how the more mature members of our family had to endure the 3 day week, 20% inflation and

As the dust starts to settle on the various unread General Election party manifestos, with their ‘bran-bucket’ made up numbers, life goes back to normal as political rhetoric on social media is replaced with pictures of cats and people’s lunch. Joking aside though, all the political parties promised so much on the housing front in their manifestos, should they be elected at the General Election. In hindsight, irrespective of which party, they seldom deliver on those promises.

There are 23.4 million properties in England and Wales with 64% being owner occupied and 36% being in rented either from a private landlord, local authority or housing association. Over nine out of ten of those English and Welsh owner-occupied properties are a whole house or bungalow. Now, most people would assume they would be freehold – however, of those renting, nearly half of rental properties, 44% to be precise, lived in other leasehold apartments and flats. It might be

This was a question posed to me on social media a few weeks ago, after an interesting discussion with some clients about our mature members of Bexhill-On-Sea and the fact many retirees feel trapped in their homes. After working hard for many years and buying a home for themselves and their family, the children have subsequently flown the nest and now they are left to rattle around in a big house. Many feel trapped in their big homes (hence I have dubbed these Bexhill home own

A Bexhill homeowner emailed me last week, following my article posted in the Bexhill Property Blog about the change in attitude to renting by the youngsters of Bexhill and how they thought it was too expensive for first time buyers to buy in Bexhill.  There can be no doubt that buy to let landlords have played their part in driving up property values in Bexhill (and the UK) and from that made housing a lot less affordable for the 20 and 30 somethings of Bexhill. In the email,

Investing in Bexhill buy to let property is different from investing in the stock market or depositing your hard-earned cash in the Building Society. When you invest your money in the Building Society, this is considered by many as the safe option but the returns you can achieve are awfully low (the best 2-year bond rate from Nationwide is a whopping 0.75% a year!). Another investment is the Stock Market, which can give good returns, but unless you are on the phone every day

The good old days of the 1970’s and 1980’s eh … with such highlights lowlights as 24% inflation, 17% interest rates, 3 day working week, 13% unemployment, power cuts … those were the days (not)… but at least people could afford to buy their own home. So why aren’t the 20 and 30 something’s buying in the same numbers as they were 30 or 40 years ago? Many people blame the credit crunch and global recession of 2008, which had an enormous impact on the Bexhill (and UK) housing ma

It was late May 2016, The Right Hon. Member for Tatton, Mr George Osborne, published an official HM Treasury analysis stating UK house prices would be lower by at least 10% (and up to 18%) by the middle of 2018 compared with what is expected if the UK remained in the European Union. So, eight months on from the Referendum, are we beginning to show signs of that prophecy? The simple answer is yes and no. Good barometers of the housing market are the share prices of the big UK

Well, it doesn’t seem like two minutes ago that it was Christmas – and now it’s all over! Happy New Year to you all. One cold December morning, after arranging the office’s Christmas cards I thought I would nip out for a quick festive coffee and mince pie at my favourite local coffee shop, Blueberries Coffee Shop in Endwell Road.  I met an old client of mine in the coffee shop and we got talking about the Bexhill Property Market. I had just completed my research for my next b

Bexhill people aged over 65 currently hold more housing wealth in their homes than the annual GDP of the whole of Powys, and this is a problem for everyone in Bexhill! Many retiree’s want to move but cannot, as there is a shortage of such homes for mature people to downsize into.  Due to the shortage, bungalows command a 10% to 20% premium per square foot over houses of the same size with stairs. To add to the woes, in 2014, just 1% of new builds in the UK were bungalows, acc

I had an interesting chat the other day with a Bexhill landlord. He said he had been chatting with an architect friend of his who said back in the mid 2000’s, the developments he was asked to draw were a balance of one and two bedroom properties, compared to today where the majority of the buildings he is designing are more towards two and sometimes three bedrooms. There is a really important point as I explained to this landlord, as knowing when and where the demand of tenan

I was having an interesting chat with a Bexhill Buy-To-Let landlord the other day when the subject of size of households came up in conversation. For those of you who read my Brexit article published on the morning after the referendum, one of the reasons on why I thought the Bexhill property market would, in the medium to long term, be OK, was the fact that the size of households in the 21st Century was getting smaller – which would create demand for Bexhill Property and the

The orthodox way of classifying property in the UK is to look at the number of bedrooms rather than its size in square metres (although now we are leaving the EU – I wonder if we can go back to feet and inches?). It seems that homeowners and tenants are happy to pay for more space. It is obvious, the more bedrooms a house or apartment has, the bigger it is likely to be. The reason being not only the actual additional bedroom space, but the properties with more bedrooms tend t

I had an e-mail from a homeowner in Cooden the other day. She said she had been following my blog (the Bexhill Property Market Blog) for a while and wanted to pick my brain on when is the best time of the year to sell a property. Trying to calculate the best time to put your Bexhill property on the market can often seem something akin to witchcraft and, whilst I would agree that there are particular times of the year that can prove more productive than others, there are plent

I had an interesting question the other day from a homeowner in the Old Town who asked me the difference between asking prices and values and why it mattered. When it comes to selling property, there must be an agreement between the purchaser (buyer) and seller (vendor) for a property sale to take place. The value a buyer applies to a property can massively differ from the value a seller or mortgage company places upon it. The seller, the buyer and the mortgage company must f

I was reading the Sunday Papers and, when reading the financial pages, it was announced UK inflation had increased to its highest level in a year. Inflation, as calculated by the Government’s Consumer Prices Index, rose by 0.3% over the last 12 months.  The report said it had risen to the those ‘heady’ levels by smaller falls in supermarket and petrol prices than a year ago. If you recall, in early 2015, we had deflation where prices were dropping! So what does this mean for

That isn’t a typo, of the 20,198 households in Bexhill, 6,438 of those properties don’t only have one spare bedroom, but two spare bedrooms! … and it is this topic I want to talk about this week, my Bexhill Property Market Blog readers – because this could be the cure for Bexhill’s housing crisis.  The fundamental problem of the Bexhill housing ‘crisis’, is the fact that the supply of homes to live in has not historically met demand, increasing property values (and in turn re