A great way to take a quick snapshot of the market to see how buoyant things are is to compare the percentage of properties that are under offer to the total amount of houses on the market. Currently 41.95% of the total properties on the market in CW8 are under offer – this represents as very healthy market indeed. Most estate agents would kill for this sort of percentage under offer on their own stock.

Going into more detail, I’d like to look back to March 2018 when there were 328 properties on the market in CW8, this is compared to 327 in March of 2019. The market in March 2019 in terms of stock is incredibly similar to the market of 2018 – there were 111 new listings in March 2018 compared to 109 in March of 2019; 81 sales were agreed in March last year compared to 73 this year. Price reductions are also similar with 37 last March and 33 in March this year.

This of course doesn’t tell the full story and it’s important to look in more detail at the housing market and what’s more relevant and important to you as the homeowner is current and latest asking prices, selling prices and how long properties are taking to sell. I’m also going to break this down into the type of property.

The average asking price in CW8 is currently £325,500. Broken down into the two most popular house types in the area, the average detached house is £483,048 and semis are £236,675. It’s very important to compare this to the average selling prices. I’ve looked at the period between January 2018 to January 2019 and the average selling price for detached houses was £338,132 and £320,714 in 2019, for semis the figures are £172,800 and £170,556.

It’s also important to look at how long properties are taking to sell. For the last 12 months, from March 2018 to March 2019 overall properties are taking longer to sell. Broken down into property types, detached houses are taking 23% longer to selland semis are taking 42% longer to sell than in March last year.

In a healthy market such as this, the main reason why properties take longer to sell is overvaluing. I’ve looked at the most reduced properties in CW8 and on the 28th March there were 40 properties which had been reduced since they were first marketed. The average reduction was 9.44% which based on the average CW8 house price of £325,661 means average reductions of around £30,000.

In summary, the CW8 housing market is healthy and buoyant with the property stock totals being incredibly similar to the same period in 2018. Average selling prices are slightly down on the previous year which will have been heavily affected by the amount of new build properties currently in the area. When marketing your property be very wary of estate agents who overvalue simply to get you on the market because as you can see from the price reduction data, many people have to reduce their asking price before achieving a sale.

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