Ignore the doom-mongering national media – we won’t see a property price crash, says Russell Quirk who’s taken the market’s temperature and reckons it’s on the road back to health.
Speaking during a podcast with Chris Watkin shown exclusively to The Negotiator, the PR guru and Keller Williams franchisee also advised the industry not to accept the word of property experts – even the Bank of England – as they were often wrong.
“Our market is fundamentally sound,” says Quirk. “If we’ve weathered the storm of Brexit and come through without prices dropping we’ll weather out what will hopefully be a few short months of disruption from Covid-19.”
He points to financial experts such as George Osborne who warned that if we left the EU, the property market would crash and prices would drop by 18% – but prices have since gone up by 8%.
“We’re seeing pent-up demand translating into more enquiries, booked viewings are rocketing. We’ll come out of this OK.”
Quirk says home-owners have the cheapest money this country has ever seen and can fix a five-year mortgage as low as 2%, while there are now “bundles” of mortgage products and lenders have slashed rates in the last few days.
“They anticipate we will come out of it and they want to be the lender of choice,” he explains.
Other positive factors include the fact jobless figures haven’t risen as much as they did in every other recession – by an extra 12,000 in April rather than the ONS forecast of an extra 172,000 unemployed. “The furlough scheme is working to keep people in work and although I suspect the total might rise to 7% or 8%, it will then recover.”
Quirk adds that the losers could be some of the corporate estate agents with their fixed overheads who are most vulnerable to market challenges, while the more agile independents can be more flexible, getting staff to work from home, or doing more lettings than sales when necessary.
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