The share of Brits moving each year has been declining since the late 1980s when, at one stage, people moved every eight years. Yet since the beginning of the pandemic, something has appeared to upset that trend. News stories painted a picture of homeowners moving from the city centres to its suburbs, from the suburbs to countryside around the UK and so on. Areas like the Cotswolds and coastal towns were swamped by the ‘race for space’, significantly affecting housing markets – this included St Albans.
How this is reflected in figures
But how many Brits moved? And how long had they been in their homes before they moved? In Great Britain, there are 28.3 million households, of which 19.3 million are owner-occupied and 4.43 million owned by private buy-to-let landlords. There is £7,035 trillion of residential property in private hands. Eight years before the initial lockdown in 2020, an average of 79,646 properties were sold each month in the UK, meaning just under a million UK households moved home annually. In those 8 years, the average British homeowner moved every 20 years and 4 months. So, what uplift was there in people moving home after the first lockdown in 2020? In 2021 and early 2022, an average of 102,021 people moved home monthly, taking the average move time to once every 16 years. So even though there was an uplift in people moving home, it was nothing like the 1980s. It shows that in the 21st Century, once you have succeeded in buying a property you can call home, there isn’t as much enthusiasm to move again.
What is happening in the St Albans property market now?
We love our homes in this area, but many of us still want to ‘better our lives’ with a larger house, better area etc, which typically requires us to climb up the St Albans property ladder. Yet, with local house prices having risen by 432.2% in the last 25 years, the cost of going up the next rung has become prohibitive. Many remember the 1980s, when we had an upbeat booming property market as a backdrop and British homeowners moved home every eight years. So now, with the average move time in the mid to late teens (in years), this equates to each homeowner only moving around three to four times in their adult lifetime.
Propensity to move changes with time
However, the home moving statistics above hide some great details about the British property market. When British homeowners get into their 50s, 60s and beyond, their inclination to move home drops like the proverbial stone. The average time a homeowner without a mortgage moves home is 24 years and 27 weeks (and just over 7 out of 10 of these are 65 or older). Homeowners with a mortgage tend to be younger to middle-aged. Homeowners with a mortgage move on average every 10 years and 11 weeks. So, whilst I cannot determine which house seller has a mortgage and which doesn’t, I can look at how quickly people move home. I have taken a look at the last 50 property sales in St Albans and found the average homeowner had only been in their property on average 13 years and 49 weeks before they sold. But looking closer still we notice there appears to be a two-speed St Albans property market… 50% of St Albans house sellers in 2022 had only been in their old home on average 5 years and 35 weeks. Let’s split the findings into quarters.
- Top 25% fastest moving homeowners moved after 3 years & 30 weeks.
- The following 25% of fastest moving homeowners did so after 7 years & 32 weeks.
- The next 25% of homeowners in 2022 moved after 17 years & 8 weeks.
- The 25% slowest moving homeowners did so after 26 years & 48 weeks.
What we deduce from these figures
When looking at the properties that fall into the slower time bands they tend to be the larger properties where homeowners have often lived for 30 to 40 years. Maybe, the one lesson from these statistics is that once homeowners get into their 60s and 70s, their tendency and inclination to move home declines significantly. This means the homes on the lower rungs of the St Albans property ladder are selling quickly (as younger aged homeowners occupy them), yet once St Albans people get older, their tendency to move diminishes. This prevents the younger generation from being able to buy bigger St Albans properties that mature St Albans homeowners live in.
Can we change this pattern?
What is holding older generations back from selling and downsizing? Sometimes it will be because they are perfectly happy where they, some will be wanting to hold on to the homes they brought their families up in. Yet as a country, is there a way we can encourage older homeowners to sell their homes to release them to the younger families that need them? Tax breaks seem one possible option but the government just doesn’t have the money to give massive tax breaks. One thing I do know is that we, as a country, have seen (and will continue to see) a lot of demographic change together with an increasingly ageing population, so it’s not just about how many households we build but whether we are constructing the right kind of homes for the older generations.
