BREXIT 2!

A week after the first BREXIT post and how are things looking for the Bristol and Bath property Markets?

The week after 23rd June saw a small number of cancellations and very few new instructions. Things were looking bleak.

The week of 4th July saw things return to some sort of normality. There have been many new Survey instructions and BREXIT is no longer front page news, at least not the only front page news. The FTSE250 has recovered lost ground and the FTSE100 has pushed higher still.

In order to assess the impact of BREXIT we have made contact with some of the Survey Price Comparison sites to see how the number of enquiries has been affected on a national or regional level. ReallyMoving reported a drop in enquiries of around 20% in the week after the BREXIT vote. We would expect this to now be returning to more normal levels.

Local Surveyors Direct issued the following statement:

“At the moment (7 July 2016), indications are that general activity is slightly down but not taking a big hit. In other words, it does not look like we are about to sink into a deep recession in the economy or in the housing market.

On referendum results day (Friday 24 June) we certainly noticed a drop while everyone presumably held their breath.  The number of customers running requests for property related services across the UK was down 31% on what we would normally have expected to see on a Friday.  But activity increased over the weekend and on Sunday the numbers were up again and much closer to normal.

Over the last 7 days (1 July to 7 July), the number of property related enquires were 4% down in comparison to the numbers before Brexit (15 June to 22 June).  This is probably about normal, as taking into consideration the time of year, we do expect to see a very slight drop in activity.”

The above is reflected in our own experience over the last two weeks. So far the housing market is holding up but we stand by comments in the previous post that some of the exuberance will dissipate and we may be entering into a period of lower growth in Property Values.