This summer it will have been five years since the UK housing market reopened after seven weeks of pandemic-induced shutdowns, releasing an unprecedented bottleneck: May property sales increased by 137 per cent on a year earlier, and the average asking price was up 6 per cent, according to Zoopla.
Then, of course, more changes followed: as the tectonic shifts kick-started by the pandemic went on to take hold, daily lives were reshaped and new impulses triggered — the race for space, for example, which saw a widely recognised exodus to the country. Government incentives, notably the stamp duty “holiday”, further buoyed the market’s tempo. As Strutt & Parker’s Oliver Custance Baker, who focuses on country houses, recalls: “In 2019, if we priced something sensibly, we’d have 15 viewings,” but of the early days of pandemic sales, he says: “I remember, in our Exeter office, someone launched a house, and we had 70 viewings of that house alone, on one Saturday.” The trend continued: 2021 saw 1.48mn transactions, the largest tally since 2007, before the Great Recession.
Five years since that first rush, the property landscape is reconfiguring once again. “The stock levels are the highest across the UK since 2013,” says Ross D’Aniello, head of country estate agent Chartwell Noble. Seventy-five per cent more UK homes were on the market in May and June than in the same period in 2021, according to Rightmove — the fall in asking prices in July was the sharpest for that month on record.