Here are the number of new instructions (listings) that have come onto the market each month along with the total number sold (with the help of HMRC) for February. I’m still not aware that the total number of new instructions as a figure is produced anywhere else. The attached graph shows the numbers for February every year going back to 2003.

The long term average number of new properties added to the market across the UK each month is 172,430.

Last month the number of new properties added to the market was 83,489

The long term average number of properties sold in the UK each month is 118,003.

Last month the total number of properties sold was just 42,000

Estate agents have reported recently that the number of enquires they are getting is on the up and last week the National Association of Estate Agents suggested that each estate agent was selling 6 properties a month on average. On closer inspection, these numbers appear to include sales agreed rather than homes actually sold and the latest figures confirmed today by HMRC of just 42,000 sales shows that the number of actual transactions is less than 4 a month.

The number of new properties coming to the market is also markedly down with only around 83,000 new instructions, down from 152,000 in February last year. This reduction in supply should help stabilise house prices but the huge fall in demand illustrated by the reduced number of transactions explains why house prices are still falling fast.

The short term outlook is not encouraging with no sign of increased lending. First time buyers now have to find 24% deposits which means that they are now having to save over £37,000 to buy an average priced house.

Over recent months it has become clear that there are very few people who really know what a house is worth. With values falling by around 20% a year the task of working out what somewhere is worth seems to be as difficult as renting an adult video and not getting caught! 

Estate Agents.
You’d have thought that if anyone should know it ought to be estate agents. Sadly, whilst the professional agent can always be relied upon to give objective advice, there will always be one who will ‘value for instruction’ or to give it a more accurate description, telling you what you want to hear. 

If you have three estate agents all hoping to get the chance to add your property to the list of others they can’t sell then human nature suggests that you are more likely to favor the one who tells you what you want to hear over the one who tries to explain that yours is not really any better than the other six in the street that can’t sell at half the price you want! Agents are salesmen, you should always ask more than one and ask them all to substantiate their advice. 

What else has sold? What else is for sale that buyers could choose for the same money? Who’s in the market for a home like yours? If there are 5 buyers and yours is the only house then your away! If the numbers are reversed then you need all the agents skill to make your property more attractive than the other four.

Surveyors.
Valuers or surveyors are Chartered Surveyors. They have the initials RICS after their name and you pay them for their opinion. If they’re wrong you can sue them. They value homes all day long – for banks, for businesses and for the tax man. Most will always be cautious since they are rarely sued for valuing something too cheaply. Many’s the time I had to re-negotiate a deal after the valuer came round and knocked the deal price by 5 or 10% just to cover their arse, as I saw it.

Because there are so few deals being done at the moment there are very few comparables for valuers to use. There are usually as many different views as there are people you ask. So, save your money and try looking closer to home.

Do-it-yourself.
Imagine I was holding up a £20 note. If I asked you to give me £25 for it you’d be reluctant to say the least. But if I ask you for £15 then I imagine I’d get your attention. A crisp £20 for the price of £15! Doubtless I could get other people too and before you know it, someone ups your bid of £15 and offers me £18. And so on.

Now houses are harder to value than a piece of paper with it’s value written on it – Zimbabwe dollars are an exception! So, when it comes to working out what the home you are selling is worth in a market when fewer than one in ten are selling you must err on the side of caution and ask a price that will get peoples attention. Ask too much and they will disappear. Same goes if you want to buy something. Any fool can pay too much but if you buy it for too little then all you have done is prepare a story you can bore your friends with for the next decade. “Oh, yes, we bought our house right at the bottom of the last property recession.  We must have made at least ……..

A London estate agent has put up a petition on the Downing Street Web site calling for the Government to suspend Stamp Duty in an effort to kick start the housing market. At a time when money is being dolled out to the motor industry and to failed banks, you might think that Peter Young’s initiative is simple self interest. But it’s just possible that he has hit on the property market’s very own version of ‘quantitative easing’.

If house prices are not yet cheap enough then buyers too might want to support this initiative and knock up to 4% more off their purchase costs.

A selfish act?

At first glance this looks like a purely selfish act. Estate agents are going out of business at records rates as the number of homes selling year-on-year has fallen by nearly 70% in recent months. Like mortgage brokers, agents only get paid if a property sells. 

Peter Young runs posh west London agents John D Wood but his call for the Government to suspend stamp duty until 2012 might do more than get people buying. A stable housing market should bring many more benefits as new homeowners go out and spend to decorate their new nest. Solicitors, plumbers, decorators and removal men could all open up their businesses again. Every new home owner is reckoned to spend around £5,000 when they buy a new home and all this money would go into the High Street helping with the Bank of England’s latest plan to ‘ease’ us out of recession by printing money.

Government lost £2.77Bn last year.

The downturn in the housing market last year resulted in a loss to the Government of £2.77Bn on 2007. Raising the Stamp Duty threshold to £175,000 has so far cost less than £50m and on present volumes, suspending Stamp Duty across the board would only ‘cost’ the Exchequer around £2.4Bn a year.

At present, someone buying a home for £500,000 has to find £20,000 in Stamp Duty. Why not let them put that towards the increased deposit that they now need to find and help unlock the market and bring the benefits of a sturdy housing market to the wider economy? Until the market stabilises it ‘s unlikely that consumers will feel confident enough to get back out and spend in the High Street. Suspending Stamp Duty might give the market the kind of cardiac massage it so desperately needs and the petition ought to find support for house buyers as well as the agents trying to sell them.

See the petition here;- http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/SuspendStampDuty/

The latest data on properties selling in England and Wales has been published. It makes grim reading. The Land Registry figures confirm formally the number of sales in November last year.

In London the number of sales was down 72% to just 3,504 – from 12,719 in November 2007.

In the rest of the country, sales were down 67% from 100,730 in November 2007 to just 33,404.

Early indications suggest that December and January will fair little better with both months showing year-on-year falls of over 50%. You will have seen from my email of February 24th that the number of new properties coming onto the market is at a record low with fewer than 50,000 being put on the market in January. Normally this figure would be over 140,000.

These figures are the worst I can remember. It’s easy to see how people are now panicking about if they can actually find a buyer at any price with estate agents selling less than one property a week.

Talk of ‘green shoots’ is particularly ironic in London were the official figures confirm that sales of homes worth between £250,000 and £300,000 were 80% down. If you put your house on the market now you have about a 10% chance of selling. Bad news not just for home owners but for all connected to house sales – estate agents, removal firms, builders and decorators too.

Just when the housing market needs a pick-me-up, on April 6th the Government will bring to an end to what’s called “first day marketing”. This will put a stop to the ‘grey market’ of homes offered quietly for sale as all properties being marketed will require a full Home Information Pack before a sale board can be put up, before it can be advertised or even mentioned to a potential buyer. Despite wide condemnation from across the industry, the exchequer will still raise over £56m in VAT from HiPs prepared for the thousands of properties that will never actually sell.