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Market Comment
Early June saw the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, with parties in streets which didn’t exist when the Queen came to the throne and many that did. A lot has changed during that time and so we ask, ‘what we have and have not learnt over seventy years of the property market?’
In 1952 our major cities were still heavily pockmarked from Second World War bombs that rained death and destruction – the type of destruction of life and property that the people of Ukraine experience today. Nothing, it seems, changes, just the location.
After the war, Britain had to rebuild, and the Queen saw, as many did, the giant strides made in terms of materials, technology and infrastructure that have come to play a vital part in where and how we live today. But, during the Queen’s reign, successive national and local governments have dismally failed properly to tackle housing. Today, there are too many under-insulated homes and too few new houses to satisfy demand. At a point in the property boom-and-bust cycle when interest rate rises and increasing energy and food costs might point to a softening in housing demand and, therefore, dampen property price increases, the lack of housing stock in both sales and lettings could instead sustain, at least, some upward momentum.
A recent political slogan is Build Back Better. Above all, we should build safer housing to prevent a horror like Grenfell Tower from happening again and fully compensate those leaseholders who are innocent in this scandal.
As we celebrate the seventy-year reign of a remarkable woman who could hardly have done better, we should also reflect on how we can learn from those years and determine to build better in future.
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