In the world of Estate Agency, August is usually a quiet month. People are usually away and those ‘people’ include some of our team, solicitors, surveyors, financial advisors – those key people who normally take the school holiday opportunity for a week or two away from the busy and stressful process of selling, buying and renting property.

But 2020 is very different. Summer 2020 will probably go down in history as the busiest summer property market of all time. Three years of Brexit-enforced stagnation and a December 2019 election delay led to a huge and real pent up demand for “property moving” which was rudely cut short by the pandemic. When we timidly returned to our offices in May we were thinking about PPE, video viewings and social distancing in the office when suddenly the dam broke and hundreds of buyers and tenants returned to the market and all of them educated by their incarceration and knowing what they wanted.

Buyers are sellers too so in June and July we carried out as many market appraisals as in six months of any other year and we then had the bonus of up to £15,000 saving in stamp duty on a purchase. August 2020 has been very, very busy indeed. The main gripe has been there aren’t enough surveyors to carry out all the mortgage surveys in good time. Some are self isolating, some are on holiday, some are furloughed – so the ones available have a huge backlog of surveys still to be done.

Face masks and hand sanitiser are now part of our day-to-day life, as are the video viewings and “don’t touch anything” physical viewings. We have learned to work in teams where a colleague “working from home” is part of the norm and remote technology is taken for granted. Property professionals from Surveyors to Gas Engineers will now speak to the occupier of a property before an appointment to confirm the health of the household and to describe the required procedure for a survey or a gas inspection. After a swift viewing of a property, it will be discussed outside in the street, not in the home.

July and August have both been very busy months on the Lettings side of the business with August seeing our highest number of new tenancies EVER in one month as more people return to London to work. There has been an over-supply of property over the summer as many tenancies were ended due to the pandemic but August saw such a rush of new tenancies that our stock level is almost back to pre-COVID levels. Rents have come down a bit and we believe these should now stabilise for the rest of the year.

There are mixed messages in the press but I can confirm that London is going back to work with plenty of new buyers and renters looking to move this summer/early autumn. Please get in touch as soon as possible if you are thinking of selling or renting your property – we are ready to help.

That’s all for this month! Children are back to school now and many of us are returning to work in our offices so we will have a better idea of how the pandemic is playing out next month. Until then please keep safe.

Teresa Brewer FNAEA MARLA