UK housing anecdote - This is interesting Pearly.
It came from the Motley FOOL UK board
from poster "countrywide"
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I paid a visit to my local car auction this afternoon, to speak to some of my old car dealing buddies from the old days (now there's a confession ;-))
What I like about my car dealer friends is that they are a pretty savy bunch and they're really out there - in the field so to speak. I make a point of saying that, because sometimes I feel some of us get a bit remote from the real world as we sit behind our PC's and consume what the media feed us.
Anyway - I have some interesting news to feedback, straight from the front-line.
Three of my friends are trying to sell their homes and have been since Sept last year. One claims to have had only three viewings between then and now. The people who have come round to view, he said, have all had properties of their own on the market and were unsold at the time of viewing. They never came back.
His estate agent, a local independant, advised him to stick to his price and not lower it (odd advice?????). His logic is that no one else is lowering their price, so why should he! (where the logic is in that, I don't know).
Anyway - this friend has a family member who works for an estate agent in the Midlands. So he thought he would call him and get some advice. The family member reported that things were equally gloomy up there and stated that they had not completed on one sale for 6 weeks!!! He also bemoaned the fact that the only properties they had on their books were dross - implying that the only sellers are desperados in undesirable properties, longing to get out. Oh dear.....
So it seems to be a rather interesting situation of the smaller minority who WOULD like to move, being held back by the larger majority who don't.
Lets face it - you can want to move all you like - but if no bugger wants to buy your house - it's game over!
I have other friends in similiar situations.
So I have a theory: The market has completely fogotton just how hard it can be to sell a property when the market returns to it's normal dynamics - let alone when it is subdued. Remember the old days when it could take 18 months to sell your house, and the three golden rules of property buying were location, location, location?
Well I certainly do - but given the 10 year bull run and regular instances of houses selling within 24hrs, despite being on a railway line, I think some people have simply forgotten....It's funny how we seem to have to learn the same lessons over and over again!!
Anyway - once I'd been fully briefed on the aches and pains of property selling, the conversation moved on to talking 'shop' - ie the state of the motor trade.
Therein lay another tale of woe. Many of my car dealer friends rely on p/ex cars being traded to them from various franchised dealers. And the problem is, their friendly franchised dealers aren't selling many cars.
Apparently one large Ford dealer in my area has only sold 7 cars so far this month. This is in contrast to 75 cars for the full month of Jan 04. Given that the month is nearly half over, it seems likely there is going to be a large disparity between sales Jan04 and Jan05.
So what does this tell us about the strength of consumer spending?
I'll let you join the dots.... |
