With everyone getting used to the ‘new normal’ after weeks of lockdown, a large percentage of us are still working from home or partly working from home. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, research has shown that 34 per cent of us are still working at home full-time and 22 per cent are splitting the week between working at home and in the office. With this in mind, how is the property market being affected?
Any good property news blog will tell you that the Covid-19 pandemic has had both good and bad effects on the property market. Property news blogs have been telling us about the benefits of no stamp duty and the struggles of virtual viewings and staggered appointments. Most recently, The Guild of Property Professionals surveyed how new working conditions are affecting people’s decisions when it comes to property, and the results are in.
The findings
The CEO of The Guild of Property Professionals, Iain McKenzie, said that just 12 per cent of people previously said that a home office was important to them; now, this has almost doubled to 21 per cent. Mr McKenzie also mentioned that people are happier to move further away from the office. Not having to commute so much is giving people the freedom to look elsewhere – potentially somewhere their money can stretch further. A property news blog has mentioned that it feels this will cause housing prices in the north and south to level out, with less of a divide.
London’s calling
Even with all these changes, the survey found that people still feel London will remain the centre of business, even though it appears that Londoners make up a huge percentage of the people still working from home. Mr McKenzie went on to state that a lot of people seem to be moving out of London to homes that cost a lot less, with the same applying to those seeking offices.
In conclusion, it seems that people are seeking out rural areas since lockdown, which could be a concern for suburban and urban areas. With fewer people commuting, the need to live so close to your place of work is not as important as it once was. Perhaps a three-bed property in Cambridge being the same price as a three-bed property in Nottingham is not so far in the future as we once thought.