Busman’s property holiday - 26 January 2010

Posted by Paul Collins 2 comments

Like many people in this industry, I find it a little difficult to get away from the property world – which is why I always like to have a good nose around any new developments in our area. Not only does it help to give me a good feeling for what people are buying at the current time, but it also reminds me why I do what I do for a living. Property; be it new or old, tidy or renovation-only material; still fascinates me.

The particular development we saw this weekend was built by Countryside Properties, but that is as much detail as I’ll give you for now – partly because I’m slightly interested in buying… Suffice to say that this was the first weekend the plots had been released to the public, so there were plenty of other house hunters on the scene.

The reason this is interesting and pertinent to a blog, is that the property we saw was possibly the first time I have walked into a new-build house in the UK and felt that there was some real thought and creativity in the layout. Instead of being confronted by the usual magnolia corridor of the entrance hall leading on to the same pattern of slightly disappointing box-like rooms, the whole of the ground floor was open-plan. With the large kitchen immediately on the left of the entrance, the living space was to be found just beyond and separated from the kitchen by a wall of glass bricks, gloriously open and lit by a wall of glass out to the garden and skylights above.

Both my girlfriend and I walked into the house thinking it would be great for entertaining, but also realised that it was perfect as a family home – plenty of space for different things to be going on, but without feeling like you had to be in a different part of the house to get and elbow room. While the upstairs was a fairly standard layout of bedrooms which were almost big enough to be right, the ground floor was a great selling point.

This property was a full £5,000 more than the equivalent sized property with the standard, boring layout, but oddly that seems to work in its favour. As a three-bedroom home, the open plan layout seemed to be a good deal at £180,000, while the bog-standard boxes for £175,000 felt a bit optimistic.

And here is where the developers still have the capacity to annoy and confound. Looking at all of the new property being built in our area, one thing is clear. Developers are continuing to squeeze demand by hanging on to the final phases of projects in the hope of being able to put up prices, while creating urgency among buyers. The same appear to be true of resale sellers, who are hoping to be able to raise their asking prices and ride the front of the wave of recovery in the property market. The problem is that the wave might never come if we all jump on it as soon as possible and drown it before it gets going. It may seem melodramatic to say, but any recovery in property could easily be suffocated if developers and private sellers are too greedy on their pricing, and we could see a return to the market inertia of the past year. People greedy about property? How preposterous…

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