2020, the year we all perhaps want to forget – but one, we’re unlikely to forget in a hurry.

There’s been unprecedented deaths in the Uk and globally. The economic downturn has been drastic too, with job losses, shops going into administration and city centres like Leeds becoming lockdown ghost towns.

Property sales and lets have, perhaps contrary to expectations, been brisk.

Part of this is definitely attributable to Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme, Bounce Back Loans and stamp duty holiday that have made the property market buoyant.

Stephen Thorpe, the director of Hogan’s attests to this:

2020 has been a year that has been tragic for so many people in Leeds and across many places in the UK. We’ve had to switch our usual business model from accompanied viewings to virtual, and these have proved popular with landlords, sellers and tenants. We’ve always operated a hybrid model with a physical office in Harehills and an Online Plus model along with Fast Sale.

But how have different types of property performed across Leeds?

Do note though that these figures are for Leeds as a whole, and not simply our corner of East Leeds.

Over the last year, the average sale price of property in Leeds rose by £9,500 – putting the area ninth among Yorkshire and The Humber’s 21 local authorities for annual growth.

The best annual growth in the region was in Craven, where properties increased on average by 7.8%, to £229,000. At the other end of the scale, properties in Harrogate dropped 1.8% in value, giving an average price of £284,000.

Harrogate’s fall came as a surprise too to us in the office.

But who were the winners and losers in terms of property types?

  1. Detached homes across Leeds rose by 6.2% from January to November 2020.
  2. Semi-detached homes were close behind, rising by 6.0% in the same 11 months
  3. Terraced homes rose by 4.8%
  4. Flats or apartments were the lowest risers at 2.2% growth

There’s many reasons perhaps behind this – one of them was certainly the rise of Working From Home, where people felt the need to move to a house with more space – for an office probably. The stamp duty holiday meant huge savings could be made on higher priced homes, like detached and semi-detached.

Now we’ve no crystal ball at Hogan’s

We do though expect demand to exceed supply in 2021.

If you’d like a no-obligation valuation of your home, email, call or message us on Facebook at any time.

Have a great Christmas too.