Aylesbury’s 3 Speed Property Market

“What’s happening to the Aylesbury Property Market” is a question I am asked repeatedly.  Well, would it be a surprise to hear that my own research suggests that there isn’t just one big Aylesbury property market – but many small micro-property markets?

According to recent data released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), I have discovered that at least three of these micro-property markets have emerged over the last 20+ years in the town.

For ease, I have named them the …

1.      ‘lower’ Aylesbury Property Market.

2.      ‘lower to middle’ Aylesbury Property Market.

3.      ‘middle’ Aylesbury Property Market.

The ‘lower’ and ‘lower to middle’ sectors of the Aylesbury property market have been fuelled over the last few years by two sets of buyers. The first set, making up the clear majority of those buyers, are cash rich landlord investors who are throwing themselves into the Aylesbury property market to take advantage of alluringly low prices and even lower interest rates. The other set of buyers in the ‘lower’ and ‘lower to middle’ Aylesbury property market are the first-time buyers (FTB), although the FTB market is in a state of unparalleled deadlock as it’s been trampled into near-immobility and incapacity by the new 2014 stricter mortgage affordability regulations and also fewer mortgages with low deposits. 

Some of you may be interested to know how I have classified the three sectors ..

1.      ‘lower’ Aylesbury housing market – the bottom 10% (in terms of value) of properties sold

2.      ‘lower to middle’ Aylesbury housing market – lower Quartile (or lowest 25% in terms of value) of properties sold

3.      ‘middle’ Aylesbury housing market - which is the median in terms of value

…. and if one looks at the figures for Aylesbury Vale District Council area you can see the three different sectors (lower, lower/middle and middle) have performed quite differently.

Aylesbury Vale District Council Property Market  – Sold Prices	Price Paid in 1995	Price Paid in 2017	Percentage Uplift 1995 - 2017
Lower (Bottom 10%)	£40,000	£176,500	341.25%
Lower to Middle (Lower Quartile)	£50,000	£230,000	360.00%
Middle (The Median)	£81,448	£343,829	322.14%

You can quite clearly see that it is the ‘lower to middle’ market that has performed the best.

You might ask, what do all these different figures mean to homeowners and landlords alike?  Quite a lot – so let me explain. The worst performing sector (with the lowest Percentage uplift) was the ‘middle’ housing market. Therefore, interestingly, if we applied the best percentage uplift figure (i.e. from the ‘lower to middle’ market percentage uplift), to the ‘middle’ 1995 housing market figure, the 2017 figure of £343,829, would have been £374,661 instead – quite a difference you must agree?

Now, I have specifically not mentioned the upper reaches of the Aylesbury housing market for several reasons.  Firstly, the lower or middle market is where most of the buy to let investment landlords buy their property and where the majority of property transactions take place. Secondly, due to the unique and distinctive nature of Aylesbury’s up-market property scene (because every property is different and they don’t tend to sell as often as the lower to middle market), it is much more difficult to calculate what changes have occurred to property prices in that part of the Aylesbury property market - looking at the stats for the up-market Aylesbury property market from Land Registry, only 46 properties in Aylesbury (and a 1 mile radius around it) have sold for £1,000,000 or more since 1997.

So, what should every homeowner and buy to let landlord take from the information that there are many micro-property markets? Well, when you realise there isn’t just one Aylesbury Property Market, but many Aylesbury “micro-property markets”, you can spot trends and bag yourself some potential bargains. 

As always I look forward to hearing your thoughts, be that by email, or by popping into our temple street office for a chat.