You know the market is more than that bland estate-agent adjective “sticky” when climate-related clichés start piling into your inbox faster than a Waitrose delivery after the plastic-bag ban. So far this week, I’ve been told that a rise in interest rates is “on ice” and that we are in the “eye of the storm” (the latter by Frank Speir, of the buying agency Prime Purchase, who covers Oxford and the Cotswolds, and says stamp duty has crushed the market more than the credit crunch).
Savills estate agency has also published a five-year forecast for prime housing markets, all of which are expected to level out or drop off by the end of 2015, as the top end is strangled by the new higher rates of stamp duty, and those lower down — in what is referred to, in a Downtonesque way, as the “domestic” market — are constrained by tighter lending criteria.
The market is beginning to crack under the weight of expectation. Zoopla calculates that the national average asking price is £358,793, but the typical price paid is just £250,326. That’s a revealing difference of more than 30%.
Advertisement
With “generation rent” likely to be hutching up for some time to come, it is not surprising that the average rent paid by private tenants in England and Wales has reached a record high of £816 a month in September, compared with £768 a year earlier, according to the letting agencies Your Move and Reeds Rains.
Asked to plot themselves on the Kinsey “sexuality scale”, 23% of British people chose something other than totally heterosexual, it was revealed this summer. The proportion rose to 49% among 18- to 24-year-olds. You might question what these statistics have to do with housing, but I predict that today’s increasingly, shall we say, flexible way of living is what planners should be paying attention to. In his original 1940s studies, Alfred Kinsey did not feel the need to investigate the connection with home ownership, but the old-fashioned desire to commit to just one house and live in it is fracturing.
There is no point building more one- and two-bedroom flats that, by the time they are completed, will sell for more than £500,000. We need to consider smaller developments that have flexible living arrangements — Pocket is a firm leading the way in London — and design one-bedders with communal guest accommodation that can be booked when family and friends come to stay, for example. The big housebuilders, who have all reaped significant rewards in recent years, should invest more in research and development on small-scale sites. Let’s experiment.
■ One such experiment using Airbnb has just ended, though. The site has become the second income stream of choice for the squeezed middle — I know of friends who let their shoebox in the capital for a night and crash at a friend’s house, or choose to visit their parents for the weekend, just to get an extra couple of hundred pounds. And in one block of flats in Bayswater, west London, I hear that Airbnbing had become so popular in the summer that almost all its residents had moved out, and the rest of the world had moved in. So many people were doing it that Westminster council has cracked down.
Advertisement
■ There are so many more ways of spotting how an area is changing than just skips and scaffolding, coffee shops and choice of breakfast cereals. My two favourite new signs of gentrification: his’n’his engagement cards, and christening announcements for twins (you know everyone is thinking IVF), spotted in a pastel-painted gift shop near the Bob Marley murals. One more: sumac for sale in the local Budgens.
Tell me what you think @TheSTHome or at helen.davies@sunday-times.co.uk