TwentyCi Property & Homemover - Q2 2023

Welcome to the latest edition of the TwentyCi Property & Homemover Report, providing a comprehensive review of the UK property market, created from the most robust residential research and property change sources available.

Our report provides a real-time review of the UK housing market in Q2 2023, covering 99.6% of all sale and rental moves.

This property market analysis and state of the nation report provides unique insight into the people behind the numbers, creating a picture of the demographic, regional and socio-economic factors impacting the UK housing market, including:

• Factual data (not modelled or sentiment-based)
• Full market coverage
• Demographic overlay
• Property sales data
• Property rental data

This publication compares Q2 2023 and Q1 2023, as well as to 2019, considered the last calendar year of normal residential property market conditions.

Report Highlights – Q2 2023:

• Sales Agreed increased 14.5% to 305k in Q2 2023 compared to Q1 2023. With 68% of properties listed having sold in 2023, in line with pre-pandemic levels, these are indications of resilience, not free fall, of the owner-occupied market.
• Average Asking Prices are also up by 6% on the quarter and by 24% compared to Q1 2019, now standing at £447k. Despite some slim downward regional movement, the widely touted crash in values has still yet to materialise.
• Residential Property Stock. In sales, shortages remain acute at the lower levels of pricing. However, levels have now fully recovered at the higher-priced bands. For rentals, the market remains under stress. A “perfect storm” of monetary, fiscal, regulatory, and demographic factors are driving historic stock shortages and consequently higher rents.
• Hybrid / Online Agent market share continues to drift lower. The lower-cost business model is failing to capture the imagination of vendors, as the share for Exchanges is down to 6.4% in Q2.

Colin Bradshaw TwentyCi’s CEO, adds:

“There has been no shortage of attention-grabbing headlines declaring doom for the housing market of late. The economic backdrop does remain a concern and all eyes should be on whether inflation slows and so interest rates stabilise. But the signs are that the market is proving remarkably resilient. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, reports of the market’s demise may well be greatly exaggerated, at least as far as the owner-occupied market is concerned. It is in the rental sector where a real impasse remains, and structural forces are leading to a perfect storm of increasing demand and reducing supply”