Estate agents’ rent and sale boards provide a rough guide to the state of the housing market – and they currently suggest and end to the UK’s property boom.
There's no shortage of surveys published predicting the future direction of Britain's housing market – and a lot of newspaper column inches are devoted to it every day. But you can get a rough guide to the state of the property market just by looking at estate agents' rent and sale boards.
The number of rent and sale boards up in an area – and what is written on them – can point to the health of the local market. And at the moment, the rent and sale boards suggest that the UK's ten-year property boom is grinding to a halt.
Rent and sale prices vary between regions
The problem with national house price surveys and the newspaper articles that comment on them is that they look at the wider picture. In actual fact, the prices that homes go for rent and sale for vary greatly from one area to another – and while one region, town or even a few streets can experience a house price boom, another can have a stagnant market.
For example, the Financial Times house price map shows that house prices in England and Wales rose by an average of 9.4 per cent over the previous twelve months. But breaking that down into regions shows a different picture.
The south-east of England experienced house price growth of 9.7 per cent over the previous year. In contrast, house prices went up by four per cent in the West Midlands and only 3.8 per cent in the north of England. And rent and sale prices can vary even more within those regions.
Demand dictates rent and sale prices
If you're looking for a purchase, a let, a rent and sale, you could be fooled into the wrong decision by the national picture. Rent and sale prices are dictated by demand, and you can roughly gauge that demand simply by looking at the estate agents' rent and sale boards in an area.
If an area has rapidly rising house prices, you will notice a lot of rent and sale boards with the "sold" sign up. And the more heated the market, the more there will be. A street with a lot of rent and sale boards marked "sold" suggests a very popular street where people are prepared to pay over the odds to live.
Read the rent and sale boards
On the other hand, streets where the "for sale" or "to let" sign remains up suggests demand is not meeting supply – and that prices may fall as a result. This is the situation in more and more streets around the UK at the moment.
If the country is to experience a house price crash, as is widely predicted, there may be a repeat of the early 1990s where streets were flooded with rent and sale boards as hard-pressed homeowners (and a lot of banks who had repossessed properties) looked to sell their homes for whatever they could get.
The trick for anyone looking to make a sale in the near future could be to get a quick house sale before we reach that stage.
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