Over
the last month, the Northampton property market has seen some interesting
movement in house prices, as property values in the Northampton Borough Council
area rose by 1.7% in the last month, to leave annual price growth at 11.8%.
These compare well to the national figures where property prices across the UK
saw a monthly uplift of 0.42%, meaning the property values across the Country
are 8.3% higher, this is all despite the constraining factors of Stamp
Duty changes in the Spring and more recently our friend Brexit.
Looking at the
figures for the last 18 months makes even more fascinating reading, whereby
house prices are 17.8% higher, again thought provoking when compared to the national
average figure of 13.6% higher.
However, it gets more remarkable
when we look at how the different sectors of the Northampton market are
performing. Over the last 18 months, in the Northampton Borough Council area,
the best performing type of property was the semi, which outperformed the area
average by 1.0% whilst the worst performing type was the apartment, which
under-performed the area average 1.79%.
Now the difference doesn’t sound
that much, but remember two things, this is only over eighteen months and secondly,
the gap of 2.7% (the difference between the semi at +1.0% and apartments at
-1.79%) converts into a few thousand pounds disparity, when you consider the
average price paid for a semi-detached property in Northampton itself over the
last 12 months was £200,600 and the average price paid for a Northampton
apartment was £121,400 over the same time frame.
I know all the Northampton
landlords and homeowners will want to know how each of the four types of
properties has performed, so this is what has happened to property prices over
the last 18 months in the area...
·
Overall
Average + 17.8%
·
Detached
+ 18.5%
·
Semi
Detached + 18.9%
·
Terraced + 17.2%
·
Apartments
+ 15.6%
So what does all this
mean to Northampton homeowners and Northampton landlords and what does the
future hold?
When I looked
at the month-by-month figures for the area, you can quite clearly see there is a slight tempering of the Northampton
property market over these last few months. I have mentioned in previous
articles that the number of properties on the market in Northampton has increased
this summer, something that hasn’t happened since 2008. Greater choice for
buyers means, using simple supply and demand economics, that top prices won’t
be achieved on every Northampton property. You see some of that growth in Northampton
property values throughout early 2016 may have come about because of a surge in
house purchase activity resulting from the increase in stamp
duty on second
homes from April, thus providing a temporary boost to prices.
However,
it’s possible the recent pattern of robust employment growth, growing real
earnings and low borrowing costs will tilt the demand/supply seesaw in favour
of sellers and exert upward pressure on prices once again in the quarters ahead.
...And
Northampton property values, assuming that everything goes well with Brexit, I
believe in twelve months’ time we should see values in the order of 4% to 7%
higher.
