Happy New Year everyone! The page has been turned, the ball has dropped, the axe has fallen, whatever term you prefer. All to say that 2024 has ended.
Personally, I’m not a huge resolutions guy and I certainly don’t stay up until midnight on December 31st like I used to. We like to go to bed at 9:30 and set an alarm for 11:57 so we can ring in the new year right at midnight, but we didn’t even do that this year. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t put a ton of importance on New Year’s Eve, I have been on record saying that “it’s just another day of the week”. I certainly don’t believe that a person can make wholesale changes overnight, nor do I believe that they will miraculously quit smoking, lose 20 pounds, quit their job or whatever other resolution might be made simply because we go from December 31 to January 1.
Out of curiosity, I searched for the most popular New Years Resolutions for 2025. Here they are:
I was actually surprised to see that the most popular response was “no resolution”. Does anyone else get the sense that people are more sceptical as a whole these days? I also see a huge flaw with how vague all the other responses are. Has nobody heard of a SMART goal before? But I digress…
I do like to use the new year as a reflection period. A time to evaluate myself, my business, habits, etc. This exercise usually begins around the beginning of December as the year winds down, I have an idea of where I will stand on my big goals and what I would like to accomplish in the new year.
For those of you who don’t know, I decided to operate my business as a “solo” agent at the end of 2022 after being on a team for 4 and half years. I loved being on that team and I learned more than I could have hoped for, but I wanted to build my own brand and establish my own reputation in London. My goal was to market my services to friends, family, past clients and their referrals to continue building my business and it has been a big success to this point.
So to all of my clients, my friends and family, anyone that has referred a friend or colleague to me, I want to sincerely thank you for your trust and support. It means the world to me to be able to help people I care deeply about to accomplish their real estate goals. I love what I do and I look forward to doing this work for many years to come.
As part of my ongoing goal to build upon the work I have been doing for the past two years, I am going to hire somebody to help me refine my marketing efforts. My goal with every email, every post, every phone call is to provide value with respect to the real estate market. By streamlining some processes and building an actual system for producing content, it is my goal to deliver more value to all of my clients, subscribers and followers this year than ever before.
On that topic, if you have any referrals for branding experts, social media managers, content creators etc. please send their contact info my way.
To the meat and potatoes of the REAL Market Report: stats. Everybody’s favourite!
A quick synopsis of the final quarter of 2024: sales were increasing compared to a very slow spring and summer in London. New listings continued to hit record numbers. BUT active listings started to decline. Prices remained largely unchanged. The signs of a shift to a more neutral market were appearing.
As always, we could argue whether we ever experienced a true “buyers market” seeing that prices didn’t decline significantly and very few sellers were distressed enough to sell their home in a pinch. You tell me if your definition of buyers market is different, but I would expect a buyer to have a very easy time acquiring the home they want at a price that would be considered below market value for us to say we were in a true buyers market. That didn’t happen.
So to put a bow on the year 2024, here are the final stats.
The average price in December declined about 1.5% from November 2024 to just over $605,000. That number is also about 1% lower than it was in December 2023. I don’t put a ton of stock in a small change like that, especially in the slowest month of the year, but of course we have to talk about it.
New listings at 371 continued to outpace the 10 year average which was 280. So 33% higher than we might have expected, historically. That number is not out of line with every other month this year and it certainly doesn’t move the needle on the market when we look at the next two stats.
Number of sales: 283. December of 2023: 280. Virtually no change. However, we hit 93% of the 10 year average which shows continued improvement compared to the spring and summer. Four months in a row now that percentage has been creeping up, a sign that buyers are indeed more interested in the market now than they were for most of 2024. This is a key point.
Active listings also continued it’s recent trend downward. 1164 total listings available at the end of December when just a few months ago, that number was over 1800. That is a combination of a few things: higher sales, listings expiring, and listings being cancelled. This number at the end of December 2023 was 1159. Almost identical, just like number of sales.
So we head into 2025 with virtually the same number of available listings but very different momentum in terms of sales.
The fall of 2023 was slow. Very slow. Buyers were not excited about the market. Most people thought that lower prices (and lower interest rates) were still on the horizon. Both of those turned out to be true.
When we compare the overall number of sales in the months of September to December in 2023 vs 2024, there was almost a 20% increase year over year. (1303 to 1553). That is a pretty big difference and it paints a very different picture for our current market as opposed to last year.
Where could this market go in the first half of 2025? A lot of people think it is going up in terms of sales and prices.
Next week I am going to pen a piece to analyze different factors that will impact our market both positively and negatively. I don’t think the argument is as one sided as a lot of the commentary might make it out to be. Keep an eye out for that!
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