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April 17, 2019
The latest house price data published this week by the Office for National Statistics didn’t make great reading for Londoners — or at least anyone within the M25 planning to sell.
Prices are down 3.8% in London over the past 12 months, as the capital pays the price for its exuberant growth of yesteryear and suffers disproportionately from being in the Brexit firing line.
At 0.6%, annual house price growth across the UK as a whole is at least in the black, but it, too, is at its lowest level since 2012. What’s crystal clear is that London and the South East are acting as a deadweight around the property market’s neck.
But while prospective sellers in London will be disheartened by the increasingly sharp house price slide, buyers and investors are very much on the front foot.
Now London is by no means cheap, and there will never be a firesale given the historical house price growth it has accrued, but professional investors in the capital are highly active given the discounts available.
In fact, I’m not exaggerating when I say that investors in the capital have a spring in their step that we haven’t seen for some time.
What property investors are banking on, and few would be against this, is that London will at some point get its mojo back, if not in the short term then almost certainly the medium- to long-term. Supply in London is simply too weak and demand too strong for it not to.
The key is to have the confidence to buy now and the financial strength to ride out the inevitable short-term volatility the capital will face, all the more so if we do leave the EU on no deal terms.
All in all, while the capital is down, it is by no means out.
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