Search regulated estate agents at www.naea.co.uk. UK property market report for November 2011.
Traditionally, once it hits November the market tends to slow up. This year however things have remained fairly static but what was interesting is some areas of the country had a a bit of a flurry of activity. The North for instance, members reported that activity increasing for the first two weeks of the month as did the South West.
Moving onto the figures, starting with the number of applicants that are registered in each of our branches per month. As you can see, it has come down from 305 to 262 which is expected as it is so near festive period but having said that it was still a higher figure compared to this time last year!
Sales again has reduced from 8 to 6 per branch and as displayed on the graph, these sort of figures have been produced throughout the year but overall quite steady results.
The next graph shows the number of properties available per branch. As expected has come down from 72 per branch to 65 per branch. But again that is still higher than this time last year. So there are still people putting properties on the market.
The final set of statistics which are always looked at are the percentage of sales for first time buyers. Encouragingly the results show an increase from 16% back up to 19%. So whilst the the sales were down slightly, it appears that in some parts of the country the first time buyers were out there! Why? This could be down to them thinking, well if I don't buy now I'm going to lose the advantage of the stamp duty holiday which when we get through to the first quarter March/April next year, it is disappearing. So if you a first time buyer in a position to obtain a mortgage then I would advise you to get out there and start looking because you will lose that stamp duty advantage and you will be required to pay stamp duty for anything over £125,000 from the end of first quarter of 2012.
Not going into too much detail but to give you a bit of a taster - next month (December) will remain pretty much the same as November and 2012 looks like things will be very similar to this year but will provide you with more details in the next video.