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The property market is rather like the curate’s egg at present – good in parts and not in others. While plummeting land values have made deals at best sluggish, small and medium sized developers are snapping up ‘distressed’ sites and seeing prices rally if not recover.
Here in the North West, we’ve always enjoyed a buoyant regional property market. The region offers a myriad of highly sought-after addresses, from Chester in the West to the Peak District in the East, the shores of Lake Windermere in the North to the ‘golden triangle’ of Alderley Edge/Prestbury/Wilmslow in the South.
This being the case it makes sense to suppose that property values here will always hold up over the long term. The question on everyone’s lips is: can they recover to the all-time highs of 2006 ?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Even in a speculative market, the key is the differential rather than the absolute value of your property. Provided you can make enough profit on your sale to secure the house you want to purchase, the numbers involved are irrelevant.
In a buyer’s market, there’s plenty of room for negotiation and a ‘sliding scale’ of sale/purchase prices – provided your vendor is not in negative equity to start with.
There’s a lot to be said, therefore, for buying a new property from a reputable developer. Not only are you likely to get a better deal overall, you will save on the inevitable remedial works involved with buying ‘second-hand’ and are likely to benefit from lower energy bills due to more efficient and environmentally friendly heating, water and insulation systems. In a perfect world, you may even be able to sell via the developer’s part-exchange deal which will not only save you money and fix your costs, it’ll give you a moving date to work towards.
In the current climate, that’s a win-win.