UK Properties Now Taking Longer To Sell
It is now taking much longer for a home owner living in the UK to sell their property, according to a new survey.
This probably doesn’t come as any surprise to most people who have been paying any attention at all to the news over the past twelve months, since the start of the credit crunch, but the report from Globrix, a property website has revealed that a large percentage of all the property which is currently for sale in the UK has been on the market for more than three months and also that this figure has more than doubled over the course of this year alone.
In January this year, only 25 per cent of property for sale had been on the market for a period of more than 90 days, but by the end of August, this has risen to 53 per cent.
The main reason given for this slow down is a lack of consumer confidence in the housing and mortgage or home loan markets. With house prices falling steadily over the course of the year, many potential buyers are being put off purchasing and are waiting for prices to fall further before they commit to buying.
Coupled with this is the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain suitable finance through a mortgage or home loan and inevitably people are continuing to rent a house until things settle down, rather than face the prospect of potential negative equity and loan repayments which they are unable to afford.
There are, of course, regional variations in the time taken to sell a house. The worst affected area is Wales, with 64 per cent of property remaining on the market for over three months, in England the figure is 54 per cent, but the best area for quick sales is Scotland, with only 34 per cent of property taking more than three months to sell.
Daniel Lee of Globrix said “With consumer confidence and property transactions at an all time low and competitive loans harder to secure, we are going to see more and more properties languishing on the market as buyers wait to see what happens next.”
