Natasha Afxentiou: Hello and welcome to OnTheMove, a podcast from OnTheMarket. I’m your host, Natasha Afxentiou, and in this series we’ll guide you through everything you need to know about the home moving process from start to finish. I’ll be speaking with our guest experts who will share their tips and tricks to ensure you’re equipped to make informed choices, breaking down industry jargon, and clearing the path to your dream home.
Today we’re going to be exploring migration patterns among home movers across the UK and sharing tips for moving to a completely new area. To do this, I’m joined by two special guests, Tommy Taylor and Daniel Ansell, joint Managing Directors both covering haart and Chewton Rose, with Tommy operating in the South and the East, and Daniel operating in the North and West.
Really pleased to have you both on here today. So before we dive into today’s topic, I thought it would be quite nice to share some background on you both for our listeners, and we could also cover the regions that you both cover as well in a bit more depth. So why don’t we start with you, Daniel?
Daniel Ansell: Yep. So I cover the North and the West, including the Midlands. So Yorkshire, which would be my Haybrook brand, as well as the haart brand, which sort of covers all of the regions. Butters John Bee, which is the North of Birmingham up to the South of Manchester. Darlows in Wales, along with haart and then the Southwest and then middle sector as well, all haart and Chewton Rose.
Natasha Afxentiou: How about you, Tommy?
Tommy Taylor: So, I cover London. We have a brand in London, Felicity J Lord Estate Agents in London. And my area goes out to Essex, Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridge and we also have another brand up in Norfolk called Howards. But as you said, it’s mainly the haart and Chewton and Rose brands elsewhere.
Natasha Afxentiou: You both cover a whole range of different regions, so I think that’ll be really helpful for the discussion that we’re going to have today. So obviously we’re going to be focusing on moving to different regions across the UK and the patterns that we see movers exhibiting when they move from one region to another so I thought a nice place for us to start the conversation would be to explore what some of the common trends are that you guys might see among movers at different points in the property ladder. So that’s looking at people like first time movers, second steppers and even downsizers. And if you see any trends in the types of areas that those cohorts gravitate towards, are looking for, or are most popular among them.
So do you see among those kinds of movers that perhaps some are more looking for rural areas, some looking for cities that are bustling town centres? What are the sort of things that you guys see when you’re working with those different types of movers?
Daniel Ansell: What some of our data suggests is that a lot of the people who live outside of London have moved historically and this year still within their own region. I live in the East Midlands and a lot of those people are still making that move within the East Midlands. We have definitely seen a change this year in terms of the types of moves that are happening though. I was talking to Boyd who runs my M1 division, so you can imagine where that is, and he sort of said people are, not necessarily at first time buyers, stretching themselves financially as much as they used to, potentially buying under budget, looking for a little bit more guidance, a little bit more caution and care to finding the right property. But the areas that they are looking at still remain very, very similar, just that the price ranges and the expertise are slightly different.
Tommy Taylor: Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. I think that the priority for a first time buyer is of course, as it always has been, is to get onto the property ladder. That’s the priority. And what we have seen certainly for someone that covers the London region is we are seeing more people buying outside of London. Not necessarily miles outside, but in that commuter belt around London. So they’ve still got half hour to an hour commuter distance into London, but they’ve got significant savings when it comes to their mortgage payments.
Because of course the big backdrop right now is of course, interest rates that have gone up and up and up. So people are definitely more stretched than they have been.
Daniel Ansell: Those second time buyers have also changed similar in terms of what they’re doing. I’d say there’s probably less of those types of buyers and sellers in the market right now, but the ones that are still in the market are more serious than they’ve ever been entering the market with the absolute sole goal of selling and buying their next property, rather than maybe testing the market like they used to. They’re sparse, but they’re serious.
Tommy Taylor: You have to remember that demographic have to move, don’t they? Because they’re second steppers for a reason because their family’s growing or, you know, they need more space. So that is a demographic as Dan says, that are serious and, you know, it tends to prop up property prices within that segment.
Natasha Afxentiou: Yeah, that’s a good point. Rather than things being speculative, I suppose with second steppers in particular, they almost have to move more than say a first time buyer would need to. In terms of when looking like you said there Tommy, people looking in London, they’re moving maybe slightly out and as you said, Daniel, looking at stretching budgets, do you ever see that when your buyers come to you, do you ever see criteria change from where they’re potentially looking initially to where they end up moving afterwards, both in terms of area and then with actual property type as well when it comes to making those compromises?
Daniel Ansell: Yeah, I think area is definitely something that people tend to have a set decision on before they contact us, but may have to in today’s market, be a little bit more flexible than they used to be with slightly less properties on the market for them to go out and look at in terms of price range, et cetera. Again, that’s about getting the right advice before they start, but in terms of where they’re looking for, I definitely think everybody has something in mind, but having to be a little bit more flexible now than maybe they had to be two, three years ago, especially post COVID.
Tommy Taylor: Yeah, I think the role of the local estate agent is really important in that, because when people start their journey, it depends when you speak to them, how long in the journey they are and how many properties they’ve viewed and what their time in the market is, because when people start the journey, they start out with this idea of what they think they can get from their initial searches, and actually it takes time to understand what you can get and I think taking the advice from estate agents is really important in that process. Particularly if someone’s moving areas, because often you can look and think to yourself, well, that’s great I can get a lot more for my money, but sometimes there’s a reason why you get a lot more for your money, even when you’re moving further out. So I think it’s really important to utilise that local expertise to understand if what your money can get you is ultimately going to be right for you.
Natasha Afxentiou: Yeah, definitely. That’s a good point as well. Because like you said, especially when it comes to moving to a different area, nobody will be as much of an expert on that local area as much as a local agent will be. So having those conversations is absolutely necessary because you can’t get that sort of insight just from looking at property listings. It’s advice that you definitely need to get from the agent that you’ve got there with you. So moving back slightly then in terms of downsizers, do you see any trends with that cohort in terms of the sorts of areas that they tend to move to, or do you see a difference maybe in their flexibility? Are they perhaps more willing to move to areas that they may not already be so familiar with, especially when it comes to downsizing, because a lot of the time, I suppose you may go from busier cities to maybe more rural areas or vice versa.
Do you see any trends among that cohort?
Tommy Taylor: It’s interesting because I think that’s an increasing segment of the market because if you think about how many people are actually in that demographic of downsizers, and I suppose what you have to do is explore the motivation for downsizing, and if you think about the gap between detached properties and semi detached properties, the average downsizer that moves from one to the other, certainly in the southeast, there’s around about 200, 000 wind between going from detached to semi detached, so that £200,000 that buys a lot, doesn’t it? Whether it tops up the pension pot, whether it helps your children get onto the property ladder, it’s extra cash, isn’t it? So one of the things I think will have influenced that, if you think over the last 18 months with what’s happened with energy prices, you know, if you think about the average empty nester trying to heat a four, five bedroom detached property, when it’s just them two in the house, that is for me, a significant motivation for them looking at that thinking is now the time to move. But, coming back to your point around do they change areas, I think there are always going to be examples of people that decide to sell up and move out to the coast or wherever it might be for motivation, but generally speaking, the data I have suggests those downsizers tend to stay within the areas they live in because of course they’ve got families, you know, they may still have jobs despite the fact they’re downsizing and you know, they’ve got links to those communities often going back decades. So I would say the majority tend to stay put. I don’t know what Dan’s findings are.
Daniel Ansell: Yeah, I certainly think that downsizers is a much more drastic market than it used to be in terms of how it’s changed compared to the other two. And don’t forget that downsizers are very much reliant on a lot of second movers upsizing if they’re not going into a bungalow. So it’s much more of a drastic move. You used to see many people go from maybe a four or five bed detached or their maximum family home down to the next level down before making a move again and what you tend to see at the moment is people going the whole hog going from the family home, if you like, down to what their end goal is without having to make that move twice, three times in a slightly less drastic way and saving on those fees.
I think Tommy is absolutely right about families do determine this, but so does work because we are seeing people work for longer in the country right now and therefore they are perhaps staying ever so slightly closer to where they were originally. However, I was in a branch the other day and the four people that rang were at least a hundred miles away and were relocating and that was four out of the five people that we dealt with on that day while I was in that branch. I was in Hayes, close to London, and we had Aberdeen, Coventry, Leicester and Newcastle, I think it was. Four really, really drastic moves. But I think families and work make a big difference to that. I think these are really serious sellers and buyers, but many of them are looking to cut the cost of moving more than once in one go. So I think that market is definitely a more drastic change in more recent times.
Tommy Taylor: That’s interesting, actually. I saw an article that said that for those, particularly those in London, that decide to buy outside the M25, for your average first time buyer and the average property price, putting down, let’s say, a 15% deposit, the average annual saving is £9,000 in mortgage payments. So there’s a significant gain to be had there, particularly where rates are right now.
Natasha Afxentiou: Yeah, and like we were saying there, context for moves is also really important to consider as well. I think that leads quite nicely into the next thing that I wanted to touch on with you both. So I know obviously Daniel, you’ve just mentioned there a handful of conversations that you had just in one day in the office recently, but in your regions, because you both cover different areas of the country, have you seen any movers that come quite often from other areas or do you see any particular trends in terms of where also sellers that you work with tend to move to? Is there anywhere that’s most popular in the different patches that you cover?
Daniel Ansell: The trends have been quite different since 2019. I was looking at it the other day and at one point in sort of 2019 there was quite a lot of people moving from Kent to the northwest and that data has really changed from 2019. I mean it’s less than halved, I think it’s even less than 20% of the people that moved in 2019 from Kent to the Northwest are making the same move now. So there’s definitely some change in culture, there’s some change in what’s driving people to make that move and where that move happens to be next for sure.
Natasha Afxentiou: Interesting. How about you, Tommy?
Tommy Taylor: Well, being based near London, you know, we’ve had certainly before and pre and post pandemic, we had, of course, a big race for space, didn’t we? Where everyone was leaving London for spaces outside and the rest of it. Actually, there’s a lot of stories about people going back, believe it or not. But it’s always been the way traditionally, even before the pandemic, that within London, those tend to be over the age of 30, tend to start to move outside of London for starting families and all the rest of it. And that’s always been part of it and what we did see certainly during the pandemic was a huge peak in people moving out all over the UK, but predominantly in the Southeast and the East. But I mean, I think it was a stat that says something like 7. 7% of all movers in the UK were coming from London for a period of time. So almost one in 10, cause people were coming out, but there’s all sorts of stats now that tell you, particularly in the lettings market right now that people are coming back to cities like London, you know, something like 30% of all lets year today are from people who originated outside of London. So people are going back and they are going back and they’re not going back necessarily to work because of course the emergence of hybrid working and working from home, they’re going back for the bright lights of the city. That’s the reality, but there is always going to be that move out of the city for things like schools, open spaces, and all the rest of it.
Daniel Ansell: One of the movements that hasn’t changed is the move from London to Wales. That has remained almost consistent. It’s not a huge number, but it’s a good number of the people who buy in Wales are still moving from the London market, which I found quite surprising. But having just been there on a recent trip, I can absolutely see why people would want to make that move with the value that you get in that market.
Natasha Afxentiou: Yeah, definitely. And until you start to explore those markets beyond the one that you’re currently in, you don’t know what you can actually get. So yeah, it’s always worth being open minded and actually looking into those different places.
So I thought it’d be quite nice to also share some data that we’ve collected on our side. We actually looked at buyer behaviour on our site so we could delve a little bit into the different places that buyers are searching for properties in different regions of the country. We broke it down to look at the most popular areas where buyers were searching in 2020, 2021, 2022, and also 23 so far, just to have a bit of an overview of the trends over the last few years. Breaking that down into a few different regions, so starting off with Kent, we saw that the top three regions movers in Kent were looking to buy properties in were across London, the Southeast and Southwest. While buyers in Liverpool were mostly searching for properties in the Northwest, London and Wales. In Manchester, the Northwest came out on top as a popular region followed by Yorkshire and the Humber and then London. In London itself, the Southeast, East of England and the Southwest were the most popular regions that buyers were searching for properties in. In Edinburgh, it was Scotland, the Northwest and London. In Cardiff the most popular regions that buyers were looking for were in Wales, Southwest and London. While in Birmingham, the West Midlands came out on top, followed by the Southwest and then London.
So what I thought was quite interesting about that is that actually people in those cities are mostly searching for properties in regions that are either the same as the region that their city is in or very close by. So, for example, the West Midlands being most popular for people in Birmingham, or when looking at London, the South and the Southeast, those were all coming out on top. So, what I wanted to obviously broach to you guys is obviously on top of the insights that we’ve shared already there’s a difference because we’re looking at searches and where people are looking for properties to buy that can sometimes be quite different to where people then end up moving to. So with the sorts of areas that you cover, what would you say are the most common things that you’ve seen in the last few years and would you say they align with some of the insights that we’ve seen between where they’ve been searching for properties and then perhaps where they end up moving to?
Daniel Ansell: I think the search criteria is very different to the end goal. I am guilty of looking at Weymouth all the time, and I live a long way away from Weymouth, but in the end, I would like to probably end up there. I was talking to a colleague yesterday about the changes since HS2 to Manchester has changed and just in the last week, for instance, we’ve seen a lot less people registering from the South and London in towards Stoke and into the BJB, Butters John Bee brand and that must have a bit of an impact on there. But many of those people would have historically been investors as well, getting bang for their book on investment properties. So, the data for searching, I don’t necessarily think is always going to be totally relevant with the data for the movers, if you like.
Tommy Taylor: Yeah, I have to echo my own journey there as well, because if you were to look a look at my search history over the last two or three years, you know, I’ve received hundreds of links from my wife over the years for places all over, all over the southeast and east of England, showing me just, you know, what we can get for our money there and that property, this property, the size of that garden and of course, after all of that and all the properties we viewed, we predominantly view properties in our local area and we moved house 300 yards up the road. So of all the hundreds of miles radius that we actually searched for property, we ended up sticking with what we knew for, for good reason. So, you know, there is definitely a variance between searches and where people end up.
Daniel Ansell: That family and work link is also super important. There is still the ability to remote work, but many businesses are moving back towards being into the branches and business units that they own, because otherwise they’re ghost towns, right? And because of that, that search criteria has changed our society from where everybody in maybe 2020 thought they were going to have flexible working and work from home four days a week to right now they’re probably going more back to five days a week in an office and that’s really has trended with what we’ve seen people log and search when they’re coming onto the market and into the market as a buyer. You know, my own criteria when moving was always about the schools. I moved into a house, I didn’t want to live on a main road, I didn’t want to live over a certain amount of money, I didn’t want to have a big garden, but I did want to be close to my daughter’s school. I ended up living on a main road, paying more than I wanted to with a huge garden, but the ability to still walk my daughter to school. And that ultimately was finding that definition of what that move is really about, as we would call it here, the why, the absolute why of somebody moving, find that absolute definition is slightly different to what you maybe get from a search criteria.
Tommy Taylor: That’s a really good point and one of the things that, you know, certainly a good agent would do is get you into perhaps additional properties that maybe you hadn’t thought about initially, because it’s so common that you speak to a viewer that, you know, I’ve told you, ‘I only want to live in a three bed, semi detached property’ and all of a sudden, you know, I’ve bought something completely different in a completely different area. It happens all the time because actually, you know, what it is that you want and what you need develops through that journey of searching, I find and, you know, buying property is often a game of compromise, particularly when interest rates are high and, you know, prices are rising.
Daniel Ansell: Many of the people that are registering as well, they’re looking for that complete service now in terms of not just the location that they’re looking for, but they’re looking for that complete service in terms of advice and, and therefore they’re perhaps open to slightly larger radiuses than what they would have been before, but only because they’re maybe having to narrow down in total what it is that is important to make that move. They don’t want to make that move and make it a mistake and then move again. So we are finding more people interact with us in a more serious way to really narrow down where they should be viewing, but then they have to remain open minded as to perhaps looking at a different area, different site price range, more bedrooms, less bedrooms, bigger garden, etc. But like I said, I think my journey is very similar to many who’ve made it post pandemic.
Tommy Taylor: Yeah, and one of the things I’m seeing as well is that, of course, during the pandemic, it was all about work from home, complete work from home. Then, of course, everyone’s going back to the office in different ways and actually, I think what we’re probably seeing now more is hybrid working. People don’t have to be in the office every single day and certainly where the majority of a good number of my offices are within the commuting zone to London, we do see lots of people move down further out on the commuter belt where places like Colchester, for example, 45 minutes into Liverpool Street, even Norwich is two hours into Liverpool Street. So if you’re not making that journey every single day, it does really open up opportunities for you to move further out. So when you speak to these offices, they do have buyers from closer to London. It’s very common. I wouldn’t say it’s as prevalent as it was in and around the pandemic, it’s definitely peaked and now dipped off to pre pandemic levels, but it’s definitely an option for people now.
Natasha Afxentiou: Yeah, I think everything that you guys have just covered there almost takes us back to what we mentioned at the top of the conversation, that a lot of the time when it comes to moving, it’s all about the motivation for making that move and when you actually boil down that ‘why’, like Daniel said, that’s where you might find yourself either compromising on different things, whether it be the size of the property, the location of the property, et cetera, but really narrowing down your motivation and the why that makes you serious about moving and trying to find that next property for yourself is what can often lead to the final result that you end up in, which, like we even said earlier on in this conversation can differ from your search to the final end result, because the criteria evolves depending on the conversations that you perhaps have with your agent and the things that you’re introduced to and the different avenues that are offered to you along that moving process. It’s a lot more complicated than just putting the search in and thinking that’s where I’m going to end up. It’s all about evolving that motivation, evolving the why, and then coming to the best place that fits your criteria in the best possible way. While, like we’ve also said, making the compromises that work for all the different aspects of your move, whether it be to do with your job and whether you can be remote or hybrid working and things like that. So it’s all really important stuff to consider rather than it just be, I want to go to this location and that’s the reason for it, there are other factors that will feed into the move and it’s the balancing act between the different criteria that you have that will then result in the final property that you end up purchasing.
Tommy Taylor: Yeah. I think you have to take it really seriously because you’re moving house, you know, you’re paying stamp duty, you’re uprooting yourself. If you’re going to move a hundred miles, you’ve got to think not just, well, does this give us the house we wish we could have here because of the budget and the space and the garden, all the rest of it, and sort of overly romanticizing what you get immediately and without, you know, the risk there is that actually you, you choose a place or a location that practically isn’t, isn’t right for you long term. You know, and particularly if you have children or if you’re thinking about starting a family, you do need to think long term if what you’re looking at is going to work for you for the long term.
Daniel Ansell: You’ve got to be looking at those transport links, you’ve got to be looking at the schooling. If you’re working from home, as you mentioned Tommy, you know, those broadband and accessible, you know, accessible use of making your home space, your workspace, and, you know, definitely thinking about, if you, if you’re making a big move, you know, not just 5, 10 miles, if you’re thinking of going further afield, stay in that location for a little while, have a little look around, go and spend a weekend there, a week there, whatever you can manage to, to make sure that you’re making the right move for the right reasons and not having to make that move over and over again. Might be silly as an estate agent say, don’t make the move more than once because we’d like to sell your house more than once, but obviously what the idea of this is to make sure you make the right move every single time.
Natasha Afxentiou: You’re listening to OnTheMove, the home moving podcast by OnTheMarket, with me, your host, Natasha Afxentiou, and my guests this month, Tommy Taylor and Daniel Ansell. So far, we’ve explored trends and migration patterns among movers across the UK and moving on, we’ll be discussing tips to help with moving to a completely new area.
So before we wrap up today’s episode for our closing segment, we thought we’d share some key things to think about if you’re specifically considering relocating to a totally new area, so we could offer some tips to help with that type of move. So to start off with, this is something that we’ve touched on slightly already in our conversation, but I think one of the important things that you need to think about if you are relocating is if that move actually works for your career. So as we’ve said, working from home is something that’s become a lot more accepted in recent years, whether that be hybrid working, some jobs allow you to totally work from home. But if that is the case, and you can work from home some of the time, it still doesn’t mean that you can very easily make your home your workspace as simply as that. You need to look into things like broadband connectivity and then likewise, if you are hybrid working, or if you have the sort of job where you do need to commute in every day or most days, and you’re not as easily able to work from home, then what are the transport links like, and what is that connectivity like? How easy is it for you to get to that location, and also how much would that cost you? Because it’s all well and good thinking, yep, there’s an easy, straightforward link that will only take me an hour in by train, but then how often will you be paying that train ticket, and how would that look for you and your budget long term, because budgets for moving home move just beyond the initial cost of the property itself and everything that comes with the moving process. There’s obviously that budget that comes later on as well. So I think really thinking about how that move and relocating to a different location would work in terms of your work life is a really important thing to consider.
Tommy Taylor: Absolutely. I think a few people got caught out during the pandemic when they moved a hundred miles away from their workplace and thought they’d be working from home forever, only to find a month later, they were being recalled back to the office and they’d moved a hundred miles away and got a dog and it was a challenge. I think you do need to check with your employer, particularly if you’ve got hybrid working that that is the future and that’s going to work for them as well as it is for you.
Natasha Afxentiou: For sure. So I think that’s one of the key bits of research to do is actually looking at what that link is to be able to make your work life work with your home life when you’re looking for that new home to purchase.
Tommy Taylor: What I’d say, Natasha, is that with that, you know, it’s for me, and I don’t know about you, Daniel, but it’s the little things that will frustrate me when it comes to where you live and things like that. I would say you’ve got to play these things through, so if you’re going to be working through what your journey is going to be like, and you know, you maybe you’ve got to get bus or you’ve got to get there, just play it through and you think, actually, if you’re going to live that every single day, you know, how does that feel and is that worth the hassle of it just to have a bigger garden or an extra bedroom, whatever it might be. So you’ve really got to work these things through and play through the practicalities of any change and not just work, but family. You know, if you’ve got kids, it might not be a big problem, but you know, when you want your in laws to look after the kids or friends that look after kids or whatever it might be, they’re not traveling an hour and a half down the road for it. That’s the reality of it is that you need to set a whole new circle up wherever it is you’re going to support you. You are on your own sometimes when you do relocate.
Daniel Ansell: I would still class myself as customer facing, but during my years in branch, literally at the coalface with our customers and our buyers and sellers, the people that made quite long distance moves, it was always that support network, that family issue. I remember helping somebody move quite a distance away and within a year they came back to register. It was a perfect move at the time and they realized that they were missing their families, their grandchildren, their children, the support network locally. I think one of the, I can’t remember if it was the husband or the wife, but one of them had a stroke and that network of support was totally different. Well, it just wasn’t there and therefore they made the move all the way back just a year later and I always remember it was quite a sad story but at the same time, maybe not enough thought process had gone into what if, and that’s the same as what Tommy said, and you mentioned it Natasha, you know, what if the broadband isn’t suitable? What if my employer wants me to go back to the office five days a week? What if I’ve got to make a long distance travel and I’m in the middle of nowhere and the transport links, whether it be road or rail, as we know is a problem often in the country, schooling as well. Schools are fit to burst, you know, getting children into school is not one of the easiest things to do anymore. I can tell you that as somebody who’s been through it not long ago. So you’ve got to think about the negatives that are in the background to all the positives that you’ve got to make the move. There must be a bucket load of positives, otherwise you won’t be thinking about it. But you’ve got to think about everything. That’s why one of the key things I think you can do is go and register with your local agents or the agents that you’re looking to move towards and definitely go and do that overnight over weekend, whether it be a weekend stay and make sure that it works for you on the what ifs.
Tommy Taylor: Yeah, speaking to your local agent is incredibly important. I can’t overemphasize that and the difficulty is, is when people start searching for new towns and start looking at what the average house prices are doing, that can be really misleading because you can look at an average house pricing. Well, that’s going down, going up, whatever it might be. But the UK property market is hugely localised. You could be in a town where that is going down one, two, three percent a month in property prices, for example, but actually the type of property in the area that you want to be, and actually those are incredibly competitive and they’re selling and actually going up in value. You know, you’ve got to remember the average house prices are some will be going up, some will be going down. So I think tapping into that local knowledge of the estate agent and understanding exactly what’s happening in that market is really important.
Daniel Ansell: One of the things our buyers always want is to make the move for as little money as possible. Everybody wants to buy their next property for the least amount of money. What our vendors need right now, doesn’t matter what type of vendor it is, is to maximise what they get for their property and that’s why I mentioned right at the beginning, people are coming to the market seriously but are looking for perhaps what I would describe as a complete agent to guide them through whether it be the move that they’re about to make or the sale that they’re about to make to make sure that they maximise what they get so that they can effectively make that move to a new town new location or whether it just be a sidewards move or downwards move in their own location. People are, and they should, always take a little bit more advice especially with those further afield moves.
Tommy Taylor: Another really good tip I would say is look at what upcoming projects are happening in those towns. I remember years ago, as early as 2009, we were talking about this project coming up called the Crossrail and what impact we felt it would have on property prices and all the rest of it. That project was completed in May 2022. Throughout that over a decade, it had a, you know, a really positive impact in not just property prices, but regeneration, development, investment in the areas and actually for those areas that might not have been as attractive, perhaps at the time, have seen massive regeneration and are now really buoyant property prices and great places to live. So I think you’ve got to look ahead because property is, of course, a long term investment.
Natasha Afxentiou: For sure. That research piece there and looking at the kind of investment that’s happening that will affect those different areas is really important and I think what covers all the tips that we’ve mentioned so far is research as simple as it may seem. Like you said, Daniel, almost balancing out your thought process, not just to be biased towards the positives for the potential reasons for your move, but also the negatives and then using that to inform the sorts of things that you’re looking for before you make that decision. Like we said with transport links, it’s not just about moving yourself around, whether it be for work or other things, but also to have your support network close by to you. How easy would it be for family and friends that you’re leaving behind in an old area to come to you? That’s something that you really need to consider. And then, like you touched on as well, Daniel, the school system, while it can be really difficult to get children into different schools, it’s also that research piece beforehand in terms of what the schools are actually like. So looking at things like Ofsted reports, they’re all things that are super important to have on your research checklist, I would say. And then again, we’ve touched on it already, if you can stay in a local area, there’s nothing like it, when you’re speaking to local agents, they’ve got the absolute gems of knowledge that you wouldn’t have otherwise that you can’t get online. And equally, it’s good to try and get that local knowledge for yourself as well. So if you’re in a position where you’re going to either view a property in a different area, or if you’re exploring them, if you can go multiple times so you can get a feel for the area at different points, that’s really useful and invaluable insight to have. If you can almost live like a local while speaking to the locals and that local agent, you’re going to get as much information as you possibly can to actually think, okay, is this somewhere that I could move to because you’re not just moving into your new home, you’re moving to that area. So what are the potentials there for your lifestyle beyond just having the bigger garden that you may have wanted to move for, you know, if you do any sort of activities that might be hiking, or if you enjoy different kinds of sports, is there potential for you to still pick that up when you move to this new location? So it’s that research piece, but actually thinking about real life issues and real life factors beyond just the property itself.
Tommy Taylor: Agreed.
Natasha Afxentiou: Have you got any other final tips that we want to share before we wrap up the episode for today?
Tommy Taylor: The main one is research, research, research, I think, Natasha.
Natasha Afxentiou: Yes, definitely.
In that case, I think that brings us really nicely to the end of today’s episode. So all that’s left for me to say to our listeners is thank you for joining us for this episode of OnTheMove. You can find all future episodes on all the major podcast platforms and we’ll be sharing links to episodes as they’re released on our social media channels too.
On the next podcast, we’ll be discussing things to consider if you choose to rent and for access to our show notes and additional information on the topics that we’ve covered today, you can visit our blog at onthemarket.com. Thanks again for listening, and remember, if you’re looking to get on the move, get OnTheMarket.
