Property News – January 2022 – Flambard Williams

Summary of 2021

Well what a year 2021 was, it simply took everyone by surprise.

Since coming out of lockdown the property market has just taken off, despite many people being very sceptical.

The average house price grew by £16,000 in the last 12 months with cities such as Manchester and Liverpool leading the way with over a 10% growth YOY.

As a company, we were extremely pleased with it being a record-breaking year for us. We have helped clients find either their first buy to let property or expand on their growing portfolio. We have worked on over £100 Million pounds of property this year and we look forward to helping more clients this year achieve their goals.

What we expect in 2022

So we are expecting the property market to still remain strong throughout 2022.

Typically at this time of year, we see a post-Christmas bounce. This is driven by people who have been cooped up in their homes through the Christmas period along with visiting friends/families and realising that theirs is simply not up to scratch. They start to revaluate their own properties which increases the want to move and search for a new place to live, this then has a positive push in regards to the growth of the property market.

Also, there is still a distinct disparity between supply and demand as you can see from the table below, this puts more pressure on the property market and prices naturally increase.

We feel that the current house price increase will slow down slightly reaching in the region of 6% for the first couple of months until Feb/March time which we then anticipate a slight upward trend as we head into the spring.

Interest Rate Rises

So as you know, we have seen interest rates rise up to 0.25% just before the Christmas period. Many people anticipated this rise in order to try and curb inflation. We expect there to be another rise in Feb/March time to 0.5% with them potentially hitting 1% by the end of year.

In terms of the effect this will have on the market, we expect this will be minimal. The reality is, mortgage rates are still low and we feel that it will really only have a detrimental effect if it were to start to hit the 4-5% like we saw back in 2007/2008.