No-one has a crystal ball!

May 10, 2015 by Rob Kahl

No-one has a crystal ball!

That was a bit unexpected wasn't it? I voted on Thursday and got myself settled in for a night to watch the telly and see the results come flooding in. I expected there to be at least a couple of weeks of uncertainty whilst the political parties tried t formulate a deal between themselves to arrange another coalition.

If we were to believe all of the polls for months previous it was going to be a very close run thing with a nail biting finale. Then at 10pm on Thursday night the exit poll came out and everything went out of the window.

It just goes to show that you can¹t predict anything really, you can have a good guess at what might happen but any accurate predictions have to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The same thing goes with the housing market. If I had a pound for every time someone has asked me to predict what will happen to house prices in 6 months or a years time I would have £482 (approximately). Again I can have a good guess and if something big is happening in the world then you can roughly say that the housing market will rise or fall. For example if there is a war on like when the Gulf War happened then prices fell due to the uncertainty globally but trying to predict the market on a local level is much more tricky.

There can be all sorts of reasons for prices to move, obvious things like supply and demand or the airport expansion to less obvious things like school results being announced or a proposed wind farm on Two Tree Island!

The housing market is a volatile thing and most things that happen outside of the housing bubble don¹t really affect buyers or sellers but it all boils down to confidence. If people think that they¹re jobs are secure, interest rates are not about to rise dramatically then they are happy to take out a bigger mortgage or stretch themselves t get that dream home. If there is any uncertainty people batton down the hatches and don¹t move, consolidation is the name of the game, understandably.

So I think the lesson we can learn from last weeks election is to not believe the so called experts with all of their predictions. Do any research you need to satisfy your own mind and if you are confident, go for it.

Having a single party govern now is not what we expected so we will have to see what of the promises that the Tories made prior to the election they actually keep. They were probably thinking, we can say what we like and when we get in to a coalition with the Lib Dems we can blame them for not doing anything.

From a housing point of view the big one was the pledge to revive the right to buy scheme for 1,000,000 council tenants. There was also protecting Green Belt from developers and abolishing inheritance tax up to £1m. Not quite relevant to the housing market but relevant to a lot of local people will be to see if they do actually freeze rail fares to commuters and obviously we will all wait to see if we do eventually get a referendum on Europe.

Not many people predicted we would have a majority government so we will have to wait and see if there do keep their promises or run away with themselves and their new found confidence.

This article is by Rob Kahl @ Scott & Stapleton Estate Agents 
Tel: 01702 47 11 55