Wetherell

With the turbulent end to last year and the quiet start of 2009, Peter Wetherell presents his personal views on the current state of the market. How will the market develop, is this the right time to buy, sell or stay put? August 2009

Video transcript:

Well, I think the outlook is good. It's very positive. If only we had more property to sell. The good properties which we've had, there's always more than one person over it. We have a volume problem, not a value problem.

On the rental side of the market it's the complete opposite, where we now have a lot more property available for rent and consequently the rents are probably down by about 10% for an average rent. This is due in some sides to the fact that people are not renewing their lease but going out to look at other properties at a cheaper rental. But on the sales side there's still a very small amount of property available.

Our experience in the market at the moment is if a property is in immaculate condition, presented right to the last 1% of finish, which is of the highest standard, those are going for very high premium prices. We've recently just sold a three-bedroom flat in Mount Street. It came to the market, and within four weeks we achieved a record figure of just under two and a half thousand pounds a square foot, which would have been a record even for the boom times. I can compare that with a property, a similar property in the area, which is old-fashioned. Nothing to be embarrassed about, it's just old-fashioned. But the market is looking at it as totally unmodernised. So the trend I'm seeing at the moment is that if it is absolutely immaculate it will get a premium price. If it's not to the highest of standards it's considered to be an unmodernised property, and then the vendors are getting offers at a low figure. But prime is still selling for prime. And we've sold... in Mount Street alone, in the last two years we've done 75% of all transactions, and in analysing those it's the ones which are in immaculate condition get the best price. A lot of agents have actually put properties on at much higher prices, due to the lack of property which is available. So it's a natural herd instinct - go for the highest price and get the instruction. On a lot of those ones you will actually see a much bigger discount. We're seeing, at the moment, that 30% of the market has price reductions. That doesn't mean that the market's gone down. It just means that the properties were put on at the wrong price originally, probably by an estate agent, overenthusiastic, just to get the instruction. What we're seeing, though, is that the offers to proper asking prices are probably about 7% off asking prices. We've recently researched the volume of sales since 2007. 2008 saw a 50% reduction in the volume of sales, and this year on last year, again, we're 50% down again. Those deals are very good deals which are being transacted. It's just that we don't have enough of them. There was a proliferation of deals in 2007, which reflected the mood at the time in both the stock market and gold, everything. And it was... We're looking back on it now with fondness as being the boom-time years, but that's only in volume terms.

We still have a very sound market, we just don't have enough of it.