As we come to the end of the first month of 2024, we caught up with one of our partners, Matthew Allen, Head of our National Country Agency Team (NCAT), to find out his initial views on the property market in 2024 and his thoughts on the challenges buyers and sellers may face this year.
There is still a cautious sound of optimism in the property market. Rightmove is producing statistics that suggest there was a record number of visits to the portal over the festive period together with most agents reporting an upturn in valuation requests in January. This gives us some hope that activity levels might pick up in the early part of the year compared to the slumber of late 2023.
There is also a greater level of competition in the mortgage market with the Bank of England providing a period of unchanged interest rates and even talk of a reduction in 2024. We are still faced with a lack of supply of good village and country property but there has not been significant evidence of the dramatic drops in prices that some people were predicting. The prime country, farms and estates market is also somewhat insulated from these impacts, with borrowing less required and on lower loan-to-value percentages.
The strength of demand for a period dwelling with outbuildings and a few acres remains high with several recent examples of strong competitive bidding. People have stagnated their decision-making for too long due to the market pauses during Brexit and Covid and now look to still capitalise on previous price rises. This has led to some disparity between vendor expectations and what buyers are prepared to pay given what they were hearing in the press last year, but the gap has been closing recently as vendors are becoming more realistic and don’t want to be languishing on the market for too long. We have also seen a significant upturn in older retiring sellers who now have a more urgent need to downsize putting a little more property into the marketplace.
In the farms and land market there has certainly been a larger influx of bare land onto the market during 2023, and we expect that trend to continue into 2024. This is also being met by healthy demand with bigger blocks of bare land still appealing to rollover, institutional and environmentally focused buyers. They are still prepared to regularly pay between £10,000 and £15,000 per acre for good-sized blocks. We also expect to see a continued supply of smaller farms coming to the market in the coming months as the pressures of a declining Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payment and a greater level of serviceability demand from the banks push peoples' decision-making process.
However, this will create opportunities for others in what is certainly a fast-changing marketplace. There should be the reassurance that there is still good demand for the high-quality village and country property with complete farms, estates, and blocks of bare land still highly prized for what might be a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
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