Property sales down - but don't panic!

As you know from last week's report, NISRA's latest Housing Price Index for Northern Ireland contains revised figures for the previous quarter.

Those revised figures showed that even more properties changed hands between Q2 and 3 than previously thought, with 5,703 confirmed sales.

Sales then dropped by nearly 11% between the third and fourth quarters, with 5,081 confirmed sales.

Belfast saw a drop too, but only by 5.73%; dropping from 1,134 property sales to 1,069.

It is worth considering that the final quarter of the year – approaching Christmas and New Year time – is traditionally the quieter time of year for property transactions, so that is actually not a bad figure.

Admittedly, overall Northern Ireland sales in the last quarter of the year were significantly lower than Q4 2015’s phenomenal 6,163 sales, but not overly surprising, given that 2016 was an annus turbulentis if not quite horribilis.

We touched upon price elasticity last week, so this week I thought I'd take a closer look at what happened to NI property sales in relation to prices over the last five years, and see if any patterns emerged.

As you can see, the fluctuations in demand are far more dramatic than the fluctuations in price. Sometimes a drop in demand has coincided with a price rise and vice versa, but you can also see that sometimes price and demand rise and fall together.

Conclusion? Price is obviously a factor in a property purchase, but there are always a variety of other factors at play.

Smart property investors need to have an ear to the ground on the macroeconomic climate to get a true picture of how the property market is likely to serve them.

Feel free to drop us a line, tweet us, send us a message on Facebook or pop in for a chat if this raises any house price questions, or you'd like some friendly advice on an investment.