House Prices Hit New Record as Demand Continues to Outstrip Supply
New research from Rightmove reveals the average asking price of a home in Great Britain has actually increased again, hitting another new record at £371,158. This is a small increase on the previous month, and slightly smaller than the five-year average usually seen in October.
The main reason that house prices have risen this month is that there continues to be more people looking to move than there are homes for sale. This means that new sellers putting their homes on the market over the past month have not felt a need to lower their asking prices to attract interest from buyers.
Buyer demand is still 20% higher than the more normal market of 2019, but it is down by 15% in the last two weeks compared with the same two weeks last year.
The first-time buyer sector appears hardest hit by interest rate increases, with demand in the last two weeks dropping by 21% compared to the same two weeks last year, though it is 24% higher than 2019.
The vast majority of agreed sales are still going ahead, with only 3.1% of sales agreed have fallen through in the two weeks since the mini-budget, which is in line with the 3.0% over the same two weeks during 2019. Agents report that buyers are rushing to complete before their lower fixed-rate mortgage offers expire.
So far in 2022, there has been slightly less demand from home-buyers compared to the previous two exceptionally busy years. After the pandemic ‘race for space’ started to level out, the property market has been moving towards a more ‘normal’ kind of housing market, which was last seen in 2019.
However, there are still more people looking to move than there are homes for sale, which has continued to push prices up. The rapid rise in average mortgage interest rates has caused some would-be home-movers to put their plans on hold. In the fortnight that followed the mini-budget, demand dropped by 15% compared to the same two weeks last year. But it’s still higher than it was in the same period in 2019.
Philip Farrell, CCO & Co-Founder of Offr, commented: “Despite the doom and gloom in the media, the property market is holding up. Rising interest rates and living costs is not dampening house price demand.
“In the short-term, the delayed budget on November 17th and the continued lack of supply may boost the market for the first half of 2023. Over the last quarter, we have seen a surge in UK agents signing up for the Offr platform, up 25%.
“We are helping agents deliver a better service to vendors and buyers by speeding up property transactions through digitising over 85% of the process. Up until now, property transactions have largely been restricted and confined domestically, with no easy, fast, and secure way of buying properties cross-border available.
“Our white-label platform allows buyers to securely submit qualified offers at the click of a button, anytime, anywhere and close deals on real estate agents’ own websites. Agents are kept up to date in real-time, track the progress of a sale or lease on their mobile device or laptop, in real-time, with instant alerts when an offer is received, if there is an upcoming viewing, or if legal documents have been updated.”
Offr has two offices in London and Dublin. All the technology has been designed and developed in-house, with no outsourcing. Offr provides a range of digital alternatives to all possible transaction types: Private Treaty, Auction, Tender, New Homes, Commercial Sales, Residential Lettings, Commercial Leases.
Offr has commercial partnerships with DocuSign; Oooba, the largest mortgage provider in South Africa; Onate, an alternative mortgage provider in Ireland; and Thirdfort, a fast-scaling provider of Identity as a Service, and Anti-Money Laundering checks in the UK
Customers include well known international estate agency brands such as Knight Frank, Cushman & Wakefield, Savills, as well as Irish firms including Lisney, Sherry FitzGerald, CBRE, and Quillsen, alongside a myriad of independent firms.
For further information please visit offr.io or email info@offr.io.
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