After her second property purchase fell through in a matter of weeks following the outbreak of the pandemic, Hannah, 27, decided to temporarily put her homebuying ambitions to one side. “The supply of one-bedroom flats in London is poor and prices are still too high as they price in the post-lockdown bump,” she says. “I read reports that prices are likely to crash in a year, so I thought it would be sensible to hold off and try to secure a bargain then.”
House prices surged to a record high in August, defying industry predictions made when the housing market was placed into lockdown earlier this year. That has diminished a would-be homebuyer’s bargaining power, with the price achieved on the average home in England and Wales reaching a record 98.7 per cent of the asking price in August, according to data from Hamptons International.
