Brexit has failed to have much impact on the housing market in Huddersfield.
And with a shortage of properties for sale in this area it looks like 2017 may be a decent year for the housing market, according to a Huddersfield-based estate agent.
Andrew Sellers, a director of Boultons, said the Brexit vote had only a limited impact on the housing market in 2016 while house prices rose by between 3% and 5% locally, consistent with the rest of the UK.
Regarding the Brexit vote last June, Mr Sellers said: “All the doom-mongers were talking about things falling off the end of a cliff. A lot of the business we expected to do during the summer was simply shunted on by a month or six weeks. Generally, it has been business as usual.”
His comments follow the final survey of 2016 from mortgage lender Nationwide which said house price prospects would depend crucially on developments in the wider economy “around which there is a greater degree of uncertainty than usual” – but still predicted a modest increase.
The building society’s chief economist, Robert Gardner, said: “Like most forecasters, including the Bank of England, we expect the UK economy to slow modestly next year, which is likely to result in less robust labour market conditions and modestly slower house price growth.
“But we continue to think a small gain – around 2% – is more likely than a decline over 2017 as a whole, since low interest rates are expected to help underpin demand while a shortage of homes on the market will continue to provide support for house prices.”
Mr Gardner said UK house price growth in 2016 had been relatively stable with annual house price growth ended 2016 at 4.5% – the same as the rate recorded in 2015.
Mr Sellers said lenders’ surveys were forecasting house prices to rise by 2% to 5% over the course of 2017.
“Nationally, housing stock levels are down by about 5%,” he said. “House price rises are much more likely to be seen in the middle to upper end of the market rather than the bottom end where there is still a very difficult threshold for people trying to find enough for a deposit.”
The Nationwide survey showed that average house prices rose by 4% in Yorkshire and Humberside over the year with the average property selling for £149,124. That compared with a 10% rise in average house prices for East Anglia and near 7% increases for the south east and outer London. The north saw the lowest increase at just 0.1%. Average house prices in London ended the year 3.7% higher with the UK average up by 4.5%.
Mr Gardner said: “There were signs that London’s significant period of outperformance compared with the UK regions may be drawing to a close.
“For the first year since 2008, annual house price growth in the capital was lower than the UK average, with prices increasing by 3.7% over the year, down from 12.2% in 2015.
