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Tim is Carpenter Oak & Woodland’s managing director. Tim has extensive experience of managing companies of all sizes, in many business sectors, including construction and building. Tim’s no-nonsense hands-on approach, coupled with his outstanding management experience and commercial acumen, make him the ideal complement to the craft-based skills of the rest of the team.
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It seems to me that I get asked at least once every day do I believe a recession is coming, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to answer this without sarcasm. (At least I’m no longer being asked will there be a housing downturn?/will house prices fall?/will the credit crunch affect us? – to which the answers are all equally obvious).
What I do think is a more interesting question is HOW will these things affect us? There’s no doubt that rising inflation and the lack of liquidity in the lending market affects us all and to different extents. But people who were already living beyond their means (and looking at the average wage v average indebtedness, there are a hell of a lot of us in that position) are in a lot of trouble and would have been anyway.
Liquidity and market confidence play a huge part for first time buyers, and these problems have caused the bottom of the market to fall out and therefore break up chains to which they were essential components. But what of our market? Basically, on a macro level, none of this is terribly bad news. It’s no coincidence, I believe, that we have the highest levels of orders on record. Our clients are either not pressed for cash (and there are a lot of us that fall into that category too), so are happy to proceed irrespective of what’s happening in the market, or they are opportunists. The slump also means that builders are scrabbling around for work, and have become much cheaper, and land banks are being released at the same time as the price of the land itself has become much cheaper. This means that if you believe that the market will recover at some point, now is the ideal time to build.
I think there’s one other factor. At a time when the sellers outstrip the buyers, I believe that prices come down markedly only for the houses that can’t sell. The better and more desirable houses remain in demand, and are therefore less prone to price drops. And what better way to make your house more desirable? Just look at this website!!!!!!
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