The UK housing market may be set for an improvement as buyer number increase due to expatriates taking an opportunity to come back home. This could bode well for anyone needing a Quick Home Sale.
What seems to be happening is that many British citizens who sold their homes in the UK over the past few years in order to live abroad are now feeling a longing to return home. For many the place in the sun has not worked out to be the delight they had hoped for and a bit of homesickness has set in. A lot have not settled and feel a long way from family and old friends. The birth of new grandchildren is also a large tug drawing people back to the UK and making many seek appropriate translations for “Sell my Home fast”!
But adding to these emotional motivations are some good economic reasons why now may be the time to bail out of property abroad and buy back in the UK. The obvious factor is of course the recent reduction in property values of about 20 -25%. Nevertheless such falls are not much help if the property currently owned, in France or wherever, has also devalued by a similar amount. This is not by any means the case for all foreign property though, anyone investing in Dubai around 4 years ago will still benefit from a healthy increase in spite of recent property price corrections there. So there are some areas where people may have bought property which has gone on to considerably outperform the UK housing market.
The second factor is the depreciation of the pound against a lot of other currencies, in particular the dollar and the euro. So anyone selling in the Euro area will have their home sale proceeds increased by around 15% over what they could have achieved a couple of years ago. The same applies to the dollar, however the difficulties in the US housing market may in some locations be worse than the UK, wiping out the exchange rate benefit.
The combined effect could give repatriating individuals up to 40% more play with when returning to the UK, making now a good time to act. So provided they can manage to Sell Home Fast abroad they can be expected to arrive on UK shores very soon. And their first visit hopefully will be the estate agents. They will in factbe cash buyers and will not want to put up with rented accommodation for long, so they could give a welcome boost to buyer numbers which will help to kick start the housing market, or at the very least consolidate the stabilisation which would appear now to have occurred.
Of course, this will not be a huge effect, no one expects repatriation in droves, but in the present fragile market every little helps.
