How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

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rollout has not much improved

Britain’s rotten mobile performance

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Moobile networks

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hut down

between March and May, the

housing market has roared back to life.

Nationwide, a lender, reckons prices hit a

record high in August. Pent-up demand

and a temporary cut in stamp duty have

helped propel interest, but a bigger factor,

according to estate agents, is that people

are reassessing their housing needs.

Spending weeks trapped indoors gave

them a chance to think hard about their liv-

ing quarters, while the rise in working

from home is already having an impact.

Richard Donnell, the research director of

Zoopla, a property website, thinks that

Britain has undergone a “once in a lifetime

re-evaluation of housing requirements”.

People want more space. Price rises are

positively correlated to size (see chart) and

the value of one-bed flats has slipped since

the market reopened. According to Zoopla,

the time taken between the listing of a

home and its receiving an accepted offer

has fallen across the board but the larger

the property, the bigger the fall. Five-bed-

room houses, which in 2019 took an aver-

age of 48 days to attract an offer, are now

being snapped up in 32 days, faster than

one-bedroom flats. Three-bedroom

houses, the category most in demand, are

going in just 24 days. Renters as well as

buyers are becoming less keen on flats.

Apartments have fallen out of the top five

categories searched for by potential ten-

ants on Rightmove, another property web-

site, in favour of smaller houses. Access to a

garden or a nearby park are much more

highly prized than a year ago.

Rightmove is advising estate agents

who advertise on its website to emphasise

different factors these days. Whereas in the

past proximity to a train or tube station was

much in demand, that “isn’t going to be

such an important selling point for those

buyers expecting to work from home

more”, according to Miles Shipside of

Rightmove. It is now, he explains, “all

about showcasing a spare room in the best

way”. He advises sellers to buy some cheap

office furniture and put it in smaller bed-

rooms to demonstrate their potential as

home offices.

The decline in the appeal of flats is a

challenge for London. While flats repre-

sent only around a fifth of Britain’s housing

stock, they make up just over half of Lon-

don’s. According to Rightmove, after the

lockdown, 54% of property searches by

London residents have been for areas out-

side the capital, compared to 45% a year

ago—the biggest fall in interest in any city.

But the turn away from flats is a problem

elsewhere, too. Flats make up about two-

fifths of new properties built over the past

decade, and housebuilders worry that the

stereotypical block of converted flats in a

former warehouse in London’s East End,

Manchester’s Northern Quarter or Newcas-

tle’s Quayside will see a permanent fall in

value. “If you’re a prosperous two-earner

couple in your late 20s you might now de-

cide to skip the two-bed flat that used to be

the first rung on the ladder and go straight

to the three-bed semi in the suburbs,” says

a housing boss. 

The foreigners aren’t helping. They

mostly buy newly built flats and, except in

Hong Kong, where a change in the status of

British Overseas National Passport holders

is resulting in some interest, international

demand for flats in Britain is slack, as in-

vestors wait to see where rental yields set-

tle. But the big question is domestic: is

homeworking for ever, not just for covid?

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