Carshalton’s New 3 Speed Property Market
“What’s happening to the Carshalton Property Market” is a question I am asked repeatedly. Well, would it be a surprise to hear that my own research suggests that there isn’t just one big Carshalton property market – but many small micro-property markets?
According to recent data released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), I have discovered that at least three of these micro-property markets have emerged over the last 20+ years in the suburb.
For ease, I have named them the …
1. ‘lower’ Carshalton Property Market.
2. ‘lower to middle’ Carshalton Property Market.
3. ‘middle’ Carshalton Property Market.
The ‘lower’ and ‘lower to middle’ sectors of the Carshalton property market have been fuelled over the last few years by two sets of buyers. The first set, making up the clear majority of those buyers, are cash rich landlord investors who are throwing themselves into the Carshalton property market to take advantage of alluringly low prices and even lower interest rates. The other set of buyers in the ‘lower’ and ‘lower to middle’ Carshalton property market are the first-time buyers (FTB), although the FTB market is in a state of unparalleled deadlock as it’s been trampled into near-immobility and incapacity by the new 2014 stricter mortgage affordability regulations and also fewer mortgages with low deposits.
Some of you may be interested to know how I have classified the three sectors ..
1. ‘lower’ Carshalton housing market – the bottom 10% (in terms of value) of properties sold
2. ‘lower to middle’ Carshalton housing market – lower Quartile (or lowest 25% in terms of value) of properties sold
3. ‘middle’ Carshalton housing market - which is the median in terms of value
…. and if one looks at the figures for Sutton London Borough Council area you can see the three different sectors (lower, lower/middle and middle) have performed quite differently. The graphs below give details of each sector.
You can quite clearly see that it is the ‘lower’ market that has performed the best.
You might ask, what do all these different figures mean to homeowners and landlords alike? Quite a lot – so let me explain. The worst performing sector (with the lowest Percentage uplift) was the ‘middle’ housing market. Therefore, interestingly, if we applied the best percentage uplift figure (i.e. from the ‘lower’ market percentage uplift), to the ‘middle’ 1995 housing market figure, the 2017 figure of ￡395,020, would have been ￡442,819 instead – quite a difference you must agree?
Now, I have specifically not mentioned the upper reaches of the Carshalton housing market for several reasons. Firstly, the lower or middle market is where most of the buy to let investment landlords buy their property and where the majority of property transactions take place. Secondly, due to the unique and distinctive nature of Carshalton’s up-market property scene (because every property is different and they don’t tend to sell as often as the lower to middle market), it is much more difficult to calculate what changes have occurred to property prices in that part of the Carshalton property market - looking at the stats for the up-market Carshalton property market from Land Registry, only 25 properties in Carshalton (and a 3 mile radius around it) have sold for ￡5,000,000 or more since 1997.
So, what should every homeowner and buy to let landlord take from the information that there are many micro-property markets? Well, when you realise there isn’t just one Carshalton Property Market, but many Carshalton “micro-property markets”, you can spot trends and bag yourself some potential bargains. Even in this market, I have spotted a few bargains over the last few months especially in the ‘lower’ and ‘lower/middle’ market. If you want to be kept informed of those buy to let bargains, please feel free to get in touch with me as per your convenience.
I would love to know if you have spotted any micro-property markets in Carshalton.
