Well, if you listen to the mainstream media – especially The Telegraph – you would think the property market is going to crash and burn this year.
Sadly, headlines of property price crashes do help generate lots of views for the media, so it’s inevitable that a slight ‘whiff’ of some price falls and some of them go wild, unfortunately at the expense of good informative reporting.
The issue is that forecasting the property market for 2023 is extremely difficult, and the only honest answer we can give is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen and that’s because we have an extremely unusual set of circumstances we have never seen before.
Jump to:
What's different about the property market in this recession?
What are the forecasts for 2023?
National average property price forecasts
Regional property price forecasts
Should the market impact on your purchase or sale this year?
Critical thoughts for buying this year
When will we know what’s happening in 2023?
Since Brexit, there has been talk of property prices falling and indeed, some of the forecasters have been right – as long as you restrict your geography to some parts of London and Aberdeen!
Source: Land Registry
Source: Land Registry
As you can see, Aberdeen prices for both flats and houses have been falling since 2015, while in London, for some, prices started to flatline and for some, have fallen since 2017.
Elsewhere however, property prices and indeed rents for many have been rising pretty rapidly, but there is a big difference between prices rising and prices recovering and, in the main, I and others think that property prices during the pandemic recovered to where they should have been – and therefore we haven’t necessarily seen a ‘boom’ which you would typically do before property prices crashed.
Here’s a summary of what’s different with the property market versus previous economic and property crashes:
So, in theory, with such a high level of equity and people not – again in theory – over borrowing in the run up to this recession and with the addition of there not necessarily being an unsustainable ‘boom’ in the first place, there shouldn’t be the huge numbers of repossessions that we saw back in the 1990s and indeed during the credit crunch (2008).
But and it’s a big but, we have these economic issues which could mean that any of the positives of the property market are overridden by the negativity of the economy:
So there are two schools of thought on what will happen to property prices this year:-
Whatever does happen I can guarantee that these falls will be inaccurate for buyers and sellers and homeowners. The reason being is that there isn’t, in my view, an ‘average’ property anymore. Property prices are falling, rising and staying the same in many areas across the country.