£1.61bn – The total value of all Warminster Property Market

“How much would it cost to buy all the properties in Warminster?”

This fascinating question was posed by the 14-year-old son of one of my Warminster landlords when they both popped into my office. So I thought to myself, I would sit down and calculate what the total value of all the properties in Warminster are worth … and just for fun, work out how much they have gone up in value since his son was born back in the autumn of 2002.

In the last 14 years, since the autumn of 2002, the total value of Warminster property has increased by 54% or £565.5 million to a total of £1.61 billion. Interesting, when you consider the FTSE100 has risen by 68.9% and inflation (i.e. the UK Retail Price Index) rose by 38.7% during the same 14 years.

When I delved deeper into the numbers, the average price currently being paid by Warminster households stands at £200,775.… but you know me, I wasn’t going to stop there, so I split the property market down into individual property types in Warminster; the average numbers come out like this ..

Warminster Property Market
Average Value of a Detached Property	Average Value of a Semi-Detached Property	Average Value of a Terraced/Town House Property	Average Value of a Flat / Apartment
£304,000	£215,786	£186,163	£78,093

... yet it got even more fascinating when I multiplied the total number of each type of property by the average value. As detached houses are more expensive, when you compare them with the much cheaper terraced/town houses and apartments, you can quite clearly see how valuable detached properties are in terms of total pound note value, when compared to the value of the terraced/town houses and apartments.

Total Value of all the Warminster Detached Properties	Total Value of all the Warminster Semi-Detached Properties	Total Value of all the Warminster Terraced/Town House Properties	Total Value of all the Warminster Apartments
£626,240,000	£571,401,328	£344,960,039	£70,049,421

So, what does this all mean for Warminster?  Well as we enter the unchartered waters of 2017 and beyond, even though property values are already declining in certain parts of the previously over cooked Central London property market, the outlook in Warminster remains relatively good as over the last five years, the local property market was a lot more sensible than central London’s.

Warminster house values will remain resilient for several reasons. Firstly, demand for rental property remains strong with continued immigration and population growth.  Secondly, with 0.25 per cent interest rates, borrowing has never been so cheap and finally the simple lack of new house building in Warminster not keeping up with current demand, let alone eating into years and years of under investment – means only one thing – yes it might be a bumpy ride over the next 12 to 24 months but, in the medium term, property ownership and property investment in Warminster has always, and will always, ride out the storm.

In the coming weeks, I will look in greater detail at my thoughts for the 2017 Warminster Property Market. 

£8m a year black hole in the Warminster Property Market - Is Buy to Let Immoral? (Part 2)

An Englishman’s Home is His Castle as Maggie Thatcher lauded - everyone should own their own home. In 1971, around 50% of people owned their own home and, as the baby-boomers got better jobs and pay, that proportion of homeowners rose to 69% by 2001. Homeownership was here to stay as many baby boomers assumed it’s very much a cultural thing here in Britain to own your own home.

But on the back of TV programmes like Homes Under the Hammer, these same baby boomers started to jump on the band wagon of buy to let properties as an investment. Warminster first time buyers were in competition with landlords to buy these smaller starter homes … pushing house prices up in the 2000’s (as mentioned in Part One) beyond the reach of first time buyers. Alas, it is not as simple as that. Many factors come into play, such as economics, the banks and government policy. But are Warminster landlords fanning the flames of the Warminster housing crisis bonfire?

I believe that the landlords of the 1,471 Warminster rental properties are not exploitive and are in fact, making many positive contributions to Warminster and the people of Warminster. Like I have said before, Warminster (and the rest of the UK) isn’t building enough properties to keep up the demand; with high birth rate, job mobility, growing population and longer life expectancy.

According to the Barker Review, for the UK to standstill and meet current demand, the country needs to be building 8.7 new households each and every year for every 1,000 households already built. Nationally, we are currently running at 5.07 per thousand and in the early part of this decade were running at 4.1 to 4.3 per thousand.

It doesn’t sound a lot of difference, so let us look at what this means for Warminster …

For Warminster to meet its obligation on the building of new homes, Warminster would need to build 66 households each year. Yet, we are missing that figure by around 27 households a year.

For the Government to buy the land and build those additional 27 households, it would need to spend £8,015,841 a year in this area alone. Add up all the additional households required over the whole of the UK and the Government would need to spend £23.31bn each year … the Country hasn’t got that sort of money!

With these problems, it is the property developers who are buying the old run-down houses and buildings which are deemed uninhabitable by the local authority, and turning them into new attractive homes to either be rented privately to Warminster families or Warminster people who need council housing because the local authority hasn’t got enough properties to go around.

The bottom line is that, as the population grows, there aren’t enough properties being built for everyone to have a roof over their head. Rogue landlords need to be put out of business, whilst tenants should expect a more regulated rental market, with greater security for tenants, where they can rely on good landlords providing them high standards from their safe and modernised home. As in Europe, where most people rent rather than buy, it doesn’t matter who owns the house – all people want is a clean, decent roof over their head at a reasonable rent.

So only you, the reader, can decide if buy to let is immoral, but first let me ask this question - if the private buy to let landlords had not taken up the slack and provided a roof over these people’s heads over the last decade .. where would these tenants be living now? ….. because the alternative doesn’t even bear thinking about!