OnTheMarket gathers opinions from across the property industry
Predicting trends in house prices is tough at the best of times but particularly so at this time of year. Currently, it is anybody’s guess where the Brexit negotiations are heading and what the ramifications might be for the economy and, ultimately house prices. Many overseas investors are likely to play a waiting game, certainly in the first half of the year. But it is certainly not all doom and gloom.
Different experts are making slightly different forecasts for the year ahead but this broad cross-prediction of forecasts will help build up a picture of what we can expect to see in 2018.
– Estate agent Jackson-Stops believes that prices will remain flat in 2018 with higher value homes continuing to feel the strain of stamp duty. “‘Prohibitive levels of stamp duty have been a real drag on the UK property market over the last year with sales levels falling by eight per cent,” said Nick Leeming, Chairman of Jackson-Stops.
– Price Waterhouse Coopers is rather more bullish, believing that average UK house prices will rise by four per cent a year until 2025.
– Strutt & Parker predicts that, in the UK as a whole, there will be house price growth of 2.5 per cent in 2018, but that in London, prices will remain flat.
– Strutt & Parker is also predicting great things in 2018 for the so-called ‘Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge corridor’, for which Philip Hammond pledged support in his Budget. Paul Sutton from Strutt & Parker Cambridge said: “House prices in both Oxford and Cambridge have been driven by high demand and low supply. And because of the burgeoning hi-tech industries in the two cities, there will need to be a lot more housing in the bordering villages and commuter towns – which, in turn, will drive up prices.”
