Introducing our May Online only Auction

Welcome to this, our fourth two day auction sale of 2021.  With sales from our first three two day auctions already at some £83 Million, market conditions remain buoyant with more and more buyers and sellers becoming active not only as lockdown eases but, the better weather and longer daylight hours certainly help. 

This sale will take us to almost 1,000 lots offered already this year and some trends are clearly emerging.  Sustained low interest rates and easing of lending criteria is absolutely helping buyers with many more now starting their property search where previous constraints on borrowing may not have allowed this. 

At the moment is it difficult to pin point any geographical location where we are not seeing high levels of demand and indeed across all property types.  Despite a tougher regulatory and tax environment for investors, we are now seeing new buy to let investment purchasers becoming active in the auctions.  Many are buying for the longer term with a view to pensions, others simply want to gear with low interest rates and use money that is otherwise sat in the bank effectively earning nothing to better their returns on capital.

Land is becoming even more popular, the one commodity that has a finite supply!  With buyers taking a longer term speculative view and again, using cash that earns nothing in the bank, to purchase at low values today with an eye to the longer term future.

Clearly as the economy re-opens, activity regenerates and confidence generally is restored, levels of transactions will gather pace.  Indeed, following a slight lull in activity mainly due to Brexit uncertainty, we are seeing the return of overseas investors that view not only the UK property market but our economy generally as a safe haven for their money.

I mention all these factors now as an indicator of activity and believe this is just the start but there is an issue, not enough property is being put up for sale to satisfy demand across the entire UK property market.  If there isn’t a significant catch up in volumes of people wanting to sell and therefore supply levels getting closer to even current demand, the inevitable will happen and we shall see significant house price inflation despite the stamp duty holiday ending in mid-summer for those properties between £250,000 and £500,000.  It could be that those very buyers that can now leverage mortgage funds and buy today find they are priced out of the market in a very short time.

We have seen these trends before and in the 30 plus years I have been an auctioneer, I have seen many instances where a property is purchased, left boarded up in the state it was in when the hammer fell only to be returned a few months later in that exact same condition and sold on for significant profits due only to property price inflation. 

These situations could happen again, if you are reading this catalogue and thinking of buying but consider a wait and see approach would be better, you may just find that the lot you are looking at today is one that you can afford today but may well find unaffordable in a very short space of time.  Buying at auction is really easy and straightforward as long as you do all your due diligence.  My team is here to help with all your enquiries in the lead up to the auction so please call or email us and ask your questions.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy reading through this catalogue and wish you the best of luck with your bidding at the online auction.