The stamp duty holiday is over, furlough finished at the end of September, unemployment is due to rise and inflation is rife… is this the end of the post lockdown property boom? Surely, we are heading for house price correction? Forecasting what will happen in the property market this autumn may not be as simple as it first appears. It’s true that the local property market is starting to settle down after an all-time number of property deals were completed in June. More will have moved home in 2021 than in any year since 2007, with an estimated 1.5 million home buyers nationally having bo ..read more

The number of properties for sale in Derby has fallen by 49% since this time two years ago back in October 2019. One of the reasons is that many Derby buyers feel overwhelmed and fearful they will not have a home if they sell theirs and can’t buy another. So, I have decided to look again at the facts and give them to you in greater detail in this article. My research has found the number of Derby properties for sale started to decline last autumn in 2020. Nationally, the same story is being written as the average UK estate agency office now has around 16 properties on their books to buy, compa ..read more

  The earliest recorded mention of Mickleover was in 1011, when an early charter has King Ethelred the Unready granting land along the Trent and Eastern Derbyshire, including land in the Mickleover and Littleover areas. The village appears in the Domesday Book when it was owned by Burton Abbey. At the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086, Mickleover was known as ‘Magna Oufra’. ‘Magna’, in early Latin means Great; ‘Oufra’ coming from Anglo Saxon ‘ofer’, meaning flat-topped ridge. The first industrial scale textile factory, a silk mill, was built in 1717 by John Lombe in Derby. Lombe had ga ..read more

As they struggle to meet demand, Argos have had to increase the wages of their HGV drivers from £11.41 an hour to £15.00 an hour – a rise of 31.2% meaning their pay goes from £27k to £35k per year. Care home providers are offering signing-on bonuses of many thousands of pounds to entice nursing staff away from their competitors, and new homes contractors say labour costs are growing as the housing boom pushes up demand for bricklayers and joiners. Restaurant chains, coffee shops, blue-collar workers in factories and warehouses are seeing wages rise at an extraordinary rate. The title of this a ..read more

Derby landlords are becoming progressively more self-assured about expanding their rental portfolios; as Derby rents rise, mortgage interest rates fall and demand for decent Derby rental properties outstrips supply. A number of reports nationally would suggest around a third of UK ‘portfolio’ landlords – landlords with more than one rental property – are actively looking to expand their rental portfolios in the next 12 to 18 months, that would locally mean…   2,327 Derby ‘portfolio’ landlords are looking to add to their rental portfolio by the end of 2022.   The pandemic has had ..read more

A recent report by Legal & General stated that since the pandemic, many older homeowners had put their plans to move home ‘on ice’. It said that fewer OAP homeowners are planning to downsize from their large family homes after the pandemic made them realise the actual value of their local community and space. Historically, many OAPs move home to another part of the country to live near their grown-up children. Yet the pandemic has shown that OAPs can live quite well locally without moving to a strange new town to live near their children. The support networks of their friends in their exis ..read more

With Rightmove announcing a national drop of 0.3% in average asking prices in August, some are asking if the steam has been let out of the property market. Yet, with the gains we have seen in the last 12 months, is this just a minor bump in the road? Alarm bells normally ring when new homeowners coming to the market for the first time are having to lower their initial asking price when compared to the market as a whole.  So, what is actually happening in the national and local property market to asking prices and the number of properties for sale, and where does that leave Derby homeowner ..read more

Whether you are a Derby homeowner, first-time buyer or landlord; the last 15 months has been a roller coaster ride when it comes to the Derby property market. With 213,120 UK house buyers and 58,580 UK tenants moving home in June, the summer has been manic for many people. This means that some Derby homeowners are asking if they should be staying put? Or, should they wait for the best home to come onto the market before putting their home up for sale or find a buyer but be unable to find a property – it’s all rather confusing. Then we have some Derby landlords who are asking themselves if they ..read more

The bungalow is a building that has represented a more leisurely, gentler way of life since the early 1900’s. Bungalows have been sold as an aspiration for those about to retire, saving them the annoyance of having to climb stairs. With an ageing population, one would think they would be building more bungalows, yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this could be one of the main issues that is holding back many mature homeowners moving home, thus creating a bottleneck in the Derby property market for the younger families who are being held back and unable to move into the large ..read more

The semi-detached house – the icon of middle-class aspiration, the pinnacle of liberalism yet at the same time compromised individuality, the ‘semi’ as it is colloquially termed is, for many Derby homeowners, the highpoint of modern domestic bliss. Britain’s gift to architecture is the humble ‘Semi-Detached House’. This type of property has been exported around the world with – the ‘Doppel Haus’ in Germany, the ‘Duplex’ in the USA, Canada and Australia.  For those young, hip and trendy people living in your converted warehouses with strobe lighting and exposed brickwork, it might sur ..read more