- Over 86% of househunters believe house prices will rise this year.
- The main reasons for this optimism in order of popularity are:
- continued low interest rates
- the growth of buying property for investment (buy-to-let)
- the fact that houses are still affordable relative to incomes
- confidence in the strength of the economy
- The average expectation is that house prices will rise 7.2% over the next 12 months, around three times inflation.
As well as capturing consumers’ expectations of house price inflation, the survey revealed a wealth of new information on the housing market, including:
- 24% of current househunters are first time buyers, still low by historic standards (of over 35%)
- 15% are considering buying for investment (buy-to-let)
- 60% of househunters are looking for homes of less than £150,000. 34% are looking for homes of less than £100,000
- The typical prospective buyer has viewed 3.6 properties, been looking for about 8 weeks.
- Typical sellers of property have had their property on the market for 5.7 weeks and it has been viewed 2.7 times
- Buyers and sellers expectations seem well matched. No seller plans to accept an offer more than 10% below the asking price and 92% of buyers do not intend to make an offer lower than this level
- Typical househunters are looking for a property whose value is 4.1x their household income (see Chart 3)
Activity in the housing market remains healthy. As more people search the web for homes, assertahome.com saw over five million page impressions in the first two weeks in January compared to four million in the previous year. At the same time estate agents are reporting increasing activity and rising house prices. First-time buyers make up only 24% of the househunters in the survey. Two thirds of first-time buyers have a household income of less than £30,000 per annum and are looking for houses 4x to 5.5x this level, extending themselves in the expectation of continued healthy growth in house prices. The remaining 75% of buyers are clearly finding housing affordable, paying multiples of 2.5x to 4x household income.
David Lundholm, Managing Director of assertahome.com said:
‘Our new assertahome.com research will be the only regular survey that asks people actually buying and selling houses what they think is happening. The first month shows that UK househunters’ confidence in the housing market is running high which should translate into another healthy year for house prices. We would encourage everyone to have their say by clicking the link on our website.’
