Director of Benham and Reeves, Marc von Grundherr, commented:
“We’ve seen the level of stock entering the market drop off a cliff in many areas so to speak, and we wait with bated breath to see what impact the pandemic will have on cold hard sales.
Unfortunately, due to the delayed nature of the reporting of completed property transactions, it shall be another month at least before we start to see any official signs of a market decline; although the latest index does suggest a slight impact already starting to show on a month to month basis.
In the meantime, there have been calls to kick start the market via stamp duty holidays, Help to Buy extensions and an overhaul of the conveyancing process when normality does return.
While conveyancing is one area of home buying that needs dragging into the modern age, these measures very much focus on intensifying buyer demand and while they may help boost sentiment, they are ill-placed as the remedy to fix a market in deep-freeze.
Demand is strong and while buyers have their hands tied at the moment, we will see an immediate uplift in activity once the lockdown is lifted. When this does happen, we must ensure that the nation’s army of estate agents are fit for purpose to accommodate this and that there is no bottleneck of transactions due to a lack of working professionals.
Time and efforts would be better spent extending the furlough scheme and assisting agents financially and operationally before we start to increase their workload artificially.”
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