New Year, New Outlook for Wiltshire Property Owners

Logic would say ‘no’ – but there’s just that little bit of magic and mysticism in the air, which is saying: ‘of course they can!’. New Year isn’t like a new day or a new week. It is a reset period. It is ambitious. It is reflective. It is forward looking, brimming with optimism – like a teachable moment that demands change for the better…

For Wiltshire, the property market in 2024 was a bit of a paradox. Demand was high – 11% up on 2023 – and yet property price increases were modest, rising only 2.5% in the end, over the course of 12 months (this figure after an ONS revision of their previously published figures, which had conversely indicated a price drop – so perhaps a reason to be cheerful).

High inflation, stubborn base rates, a General Election and then a relatively unfriendly budget conspired to suppress the market through 2024.

And yet, we enter 2025 with this burgeoning sense of optimism.

We still have that high demand from buyers looking for a Wiltshire property. We have seen properties hitting the open market with banks of viewings already booked, just from our social media and soft launches, our member agents speaking to buyers they have registered, eager to get ahead of the crowd (some people call it ‘good old fashioned estate agency’… we just call it ‘estate agency’). We’ve seen two base rate cuts over the past 6 months, and despite a tough fiscal landscape we still expect to see more through 2025 – an opinion backed up by economists. Mortgage rates have become more competitive and again are set to fall further. And now, entering the new year, the major forecasters have come out in an oddly unified voice, from Zoopla and Rightmove and the likes of The Halifax, to the boffins in the back rooms of the Savills and Knight Frank HQs, offering predictions that 2025 house prices will increase by between 2.5% and 5%, but with the majority hovering at around 3 to 4%.

Modest and steady and stable, slightly ahead of predicted inflation – exactly what the property market needs.

Stamp duty increases from April 1st are going to add £2,500 to the costs of most non-first-time property purchases in our area. It’s a pain, but in an area where our average property purchase is £336,000 according to the Office for National Statistics, that extra £2,500 is a nuisance, not a killer blow. For first-time purchasers however, the story is positive. It’s been well broadcast that the first-time buyer zero-pounds threshold will drop from £425,000 to £300,000 on April 1^st. However, we live in an area where our average first time buyer is purchasing at £264,000 (again drawing data from the Office for National Statistics), which means that most first time buyers in our region won’t have to rush – as their costs are not increasing.

Their sellers might want them to rush, of course, if they are buying on (remembering that most transactions for non-first-time buyers will increase by £2,500 from April 1^st), but ultimately that increase in stamp duty is unlikely to cause an issue for the property market, other than perhaps in the very short term in early April, when we will no doubt see a few more price renegotiations than normal being attempted to mitigate the increase.

Despite our belief here that the market is likely to remain robust this year regardless of the stamp duty change, that change itself is nevertheless likely to spell a busy first quarter of 2025, as these cliff-edge stamp duty deadlines often do.

For better or worse, coming to its conclusion on March 31^st just as the spring market kicks into gear, a week before the all-important Easter break (from a property market point of view), and with an expectation that mortgage rates, along with the Bank of England base rate, will likely have come down a notch or two by that point, our view is that the first half of 2025 is going to paint the picture for the year as a whole, when we look back and pour over things in another twelve months’ time.