It appears the UK housing market ended 2024 on a high, with broad agreement across the usual surveys that the market had grown during the year. Nationwide reports UK house prices ended 2024 4.7% higher than a year ago. Halifax, despite noting a brief fall in house prices between November and December, concluded a 3.3% increase across the year. HM Land Registry figures (to Oct 2024 – the full year won’t be out till Feb 2025) suggested a 3.4% increase.
However, there are some hurdles ahead to navigate through. The first is the ending of the stamp duty holiday on 31st March 2025. Broadly speaking, this tax change will cost many buyers another £2500 if buying above £250,000 and will also hurt first time buyers by dropping the nil stamp duty threshold for them from £425,000 to £300,000. This is on top of the November budget changes to SDLT which hit investors particularly hard (now 5% additional SDLT on top of standard rates). The second hurdle which may affect the market is the threatened implementation of the Rental Rights Bill (May/June?). According to the NRLA (National Residential Landlords Association), 31% of landlords are planning to sell properties they rent out in the next two years due to extra cost pressures and their perception of the impact of new legislation (including potential 2030 Energy Efficiency rule changes). Welcome news to some buyers struggling to find but continued bad news tor prospective tenants on top of recent rent rises.
On a more local level, the property market in 2024 in Bath performed in a similar fashion to national figures above. Dependent on the statistics examined, prices ended 2024 between 3% and 5% higher than the start of the year.
There are 17% more available properties in Bath than a year ago (593 vs 497), although this is partly down to a significant increase (+25%) in numbers of flats available (now 48.5% of total available homes). Is this a sign of landlords selling up as mentioned above?
Total property on market (“available”) in Bath – 593
(via Home.co.uk)
Average Time on Market
Less than 1 month – 15.8%
Less than 2 months – 25.6%
More than 1 year – 9.1%
Selling Time in Bath (last 90 days)
Mean – 129 days
Median – 66 days
Properties for Sale in Bath by Price
Under 200k – 5.9%
200k to 300k – 17.3%
300k to 500k – 35%
500k+ – 41.6%
Median Selling Times in Bath by property type
Flats – 111 days
Terraced – 62 days
Semi-detached – 61 days
Detached – 55 days
Property on market by Type
Flats – 48.5%
Terraced – 21.5%
Semi-detached – 15.3%
Detached – 12.4%
A small side note given there is always much debate over the validity of Christmas marketing and indeed whether estate agents should be available over the festive break, we have crunched some numbers on those owners who bought into the Boxing Day corporate marketing spiel! Between 24th Dec and 4th Jan, 61 properties were launched to the market in Bath whereas the average for a similar two week period in Oct or Sept 2024 was between 90 and 175 new instructions per fortnight.
