Are Medway House Prices Set to Fall this Autumn?

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The stamp duty tax holiday is over, furlough finished at the end of September, unemployment is due to rise and inflation is rife … is this the end of the post lockdown Medway property boom?

Surely, we are heading for house price correction?

Forecasting what will happen in the Medway property market this Autumn may not be as simple as it first appears.

It’s true the Medway property market is starting to settle down after an all-time number of property deals were completed in June.

More Medway people will have moved home in 2021 than in any year since 2007, with an estimated 1.5 million home buyers nationally having bought a property.

Roll the clock back to last Christmas, and the Government’s Office for Budget Responsibility, projected that national house prices would drop between 6% and 8%.

By Christmas, the price of the average home

in Medway will be about £308,400 up 9.9% on last Christmas.

Let us not forget there were so many ambiguities at the start of 2021. We were about to start a 5-month lockdown, hospitals were bursting at the seams with patients, the vaccines hadn’t started, 4 in 10 employers had furloughed their staff and we had just had Brexit ... things didn’t look good.

Yet, nothing could be further from the truth 10 months later - the Medway property market has been on fire. But after a heated summer in the Medway property market, things certainly can’t carry on as they have been since the end of lockdown. 

So, where are we with the Medway property market as it stands? Taking reference from historical data on the website The Advisory (I would certainly recommend you check it out)…

71% of properties on the market today in Medway

are sold subject to contract (stc).

How does this compare to October 2019 and October 2017?

In October 2017, 51% of Medway properties were sold stc,

 whilst in October 2019, 43% of properties were sold stc.

Yet how does that compare to the national picture?

In 2017, 39.72% of the country’s properties for sale were sold stc whilst in 2019, that figure was 38.11%.

Now I love a good league table, so then decided to compare our locality to the rest of the country

So, I chose to look at the ME2 postcode specifically. For information, there are 2,234 postcode districts in the country. 

The 2021 sold stats put ME2 in at 119th place in

the country, 499th in 2017 and 442nd in 2019

… meaning we have improved from the 2017 and 2019 figures.

As we enter the last 3 months of the year, there are not so many uncertainties as there were at the start of 2021. On the good news front, 49 million Brits have had at least one jab (45m two jabs) and the UK will be the world’s fastest growing advanced economy this year according to the IMF.

Conversely, the furlough scheme ended at the end of September and with energy prices going through the roof, a real shortage of homes for sale (as I have discussed a number of times in recent blogs) and rising inflation on the back of a shortage of raw materials and trained staff, forecasting this and what will happen to Medway house prices might not be as easy as it seems.

Post stamp duty holiday, it is now recognised that the majority of the demand for people moving home is focused by a profound unhappiness and frustration with the homes we live in, revealed during the first lockdown in 2020.

Buyers (and tenants – so take note Medway buy-to-let landlords) want space ... in fact, three types of space … and they will pay handsomely for them!

• Office space (be that bedroom or study)

• Outside space (gardens or proximity to green areas)

• Broadband with ‘outa-space’ download speeds

And whilst there is a shortage of properties coming on to the market, demand and supply economics mean…

Medway house prices should remain relatively stable going into 2022.

The number of properties coming onto the market in Medway is slowly improving, yet not enough to diminish house values.

Also, don’t forget Medway first-time buyers still have stamp duty relief all to themselves again and mortgages are cheap. At the beginning of the 2020 lockdown (spring 2020), mortgage providers removed their higher risk 5% deposit mortgages for fear of a housing market crash. Currently, the vast majority of these low 5% deposit mortgages are back, together with the Governments own 5% deposit mortgages.

Yet many Medway homeowners are concerned about inflation

and its effect on their mortgage payments.

Inflation is important because if inflation gets too high, the Bank of England will need to raise interest rates to reduce inflation. Because mortgages payments are based on the bank of England interest rate, higher mortgage payments will affect what people can afford. Normally the higher the mortgage rate, the less likely house prices are to increase (and in fact if interest rates are too high, house prices will fall). 

Whilst I can’t give you advice, with the Bank of England base rate at a 300-year historic low of 0.1%, I’m still surprised that nearly 3 in 10 Medway homeowners with mortgages are not on a fixed rate mortgage. There has never been a better time to get a fixed rate mortgage, as there are deals out there with interest rates as low as 1%. This means even if interest rates do go up in the short term, you will be protected from higher mortgage costs. Anyway, back to inflation.

Inflation did rise quite quickly and steeply in 2008/9