UK Property: Busiest October For Sales in 5 Years - Enness in Express

LAST month was the busiest October in the UK for home sales for the last five years, latest figures released this morning confirm.

A report issued by HMRC today highlights that 105,630 homes were purchased in October. This represents a monthly increase of 9.8 percent from September, when 96,180 properties were sold, and a rise of 8.1 percent compared against the same time last year, when there were 99,560 residential sales completions.

What’s also reassuring is to look at how well overall the residential property market has fared despite the otherwise troubled economic outlook. HMRC’s figures show that 797,990 homes have been purchased in the UK so far in 2020.

Although that’s lower than usually expected, with the total number of purchases usually around 1.1 million per year, that’s far healthier than some analysts predicted at the start of the Covid crisis in the spring.

It’s also interesting to compare where we are now with the last black swan financial event. In 2009, which is widely acknowledged as the worst year for the UK property market during the Credit Crunch, a total of 847,750 homes were purchased according to previous HMRC records.

Given that it’s highly likely November and December this year will possibly see similar, if not higher, transaction levels than last month, it’s reasonable to conclude that we could reach around one million homes sold in 2020, which rather puts the current market sentiment into context.

Full article available here