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Buyer distractions - James Wyatt, Barton Wyatt

Market seasonality

With the World Cup football tournament finally at a conclusion, us poor estate agents have once again found business drastically slowing up due to the public’s enduring love affair with Summer sport.

In our leafy corner of Surrey, we are surrounded by wealthy types who love nothing better than to take a day off work to play golf, whilst claiming cheerily to their colleagues (and wife) that it constitutes excellent networking and is therefore legitimate work.

Viewings have been down drastically and when looking into the situation, another sport pops up. It has of course been Wimbledon for the last two weeks – which is of course also an excellent opportunity for businesses to entertain their clients, therefore rendering office work and house hunting completely impossible.

All of this comes just after a whole week of Royal Ascot racing just down the road from my office which means gridlocked roads locally. In fact, all the shops and estate agents in Ascot have the pleasure of closing half way through the day to avoid the stampede when everyone leaves the races in their rather blurry condition.

Next we had the Grand Prix at Silverstone which so many of our clients go to and they are therefore completely uninterested in viewing houses during those few days.

Throughout the coming months and particularly towards the end of July, there is the polo season. We have several clubs locally - the most famous of which is the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park. This actually produces some work as visiting polo players like to rent houses for the polo season, and some of them come with deep pockets for the right property. However, Mr Corporate rather likes polo, so no house hunting during this time either.

July and August are the school holidays and plenty of our clients disappear to their villa in Barbados (typically) for at least a month so house selling is difficult during these months.

At the beginning of September, the kids go back to school – hooray! This is at last a good selling time for us. If we are lucky, we might get six weeks of good solid selling, whilst the prospective purchasers (exhausted by all their sport watching) look for somewhere to buy so that they can move in for Christmas.

By the middle of October though the leaves are falling off the trees and the viewings fall off again as we head into Winter and the Christmas period when no one is interested in anything but having a good time shopping and partying.

Come the New Year, there are always two or three weeks when the market springs into life. New year resolutions are in place and everyone makes some sort of effort to buy their new home. But as we all know, new year resolutions tend to collapse after two or three weeks, and so do our viewings. The quiet period continues through February. Half term used to be a good viewing time, but these days everyone seems to be skiing!

The gloom continues until Easter when we all hope for some activity and usually there is.

Kids are back to school towards the end of April and during much of May we usually see excellent activity. This is messed up by the beginning of the Summer sport season towards the end of May when the huge European Golf Championship at Wentworth is held on our doorstep. This creates mayhem for a week and severe disruption for a couple of weeks either side whilst temporary buildings are put up and taken down and then we are back to June.

I suppose us estate agents are masters of excuses. Recently we have been relatively quiet and have managed to blame it all on the Election and more recently all on the Emergency Budget.

I have heard excuses relating to the weather – it has been too hot recently with people finding no energy to go house hunting.

Earlier in the year was of course the snow, and if it’s rainy or windy, this will also be given as a perfectly valid excuse for the market being quiet.

Not so long ago, the banks collapsed which I guess really was a valid excuse for watching where the market is going, and coming up we now have the latest excuse of impending interest rate rises holding off interest from some buyers.

The recent Emergency Budget was relatively neutral, and for those buyers who had been holding off for many many months, we expect to see the brakes coming off and an increased number of sales going through.

In conclusion, sport can be a very upsetting factor to the house selling market, with various excuses following closely behind as to why we aren’t selling.

In fact, by my calculations, we have about seventeen weeks of selling per year which means we have to pack an awful lot of work into a relatively short time!

James Wyatt

James Wyatt is the Senior Partner of Barton Wyatt UK and International – a family run business in Wentworth since 1965. He is a savvy property professional delivering a top class service to his discerning clients. Barton Wyatt specialize in Wentworth Estate homes and golf properties globally.

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