Inside it features stone flagged floors, with open fireplaces downstairs in the three reception rooms and kitchen-breakfast room, and five bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. But they have also been held back due to a lack of trading up activity from the lower reaches of the provincial market,” it reports.That mainstream provincial market has been disappointingly sluggish in 1995. Owners of houses which have no outstanding features find they can only compete with the dozens of others on offer by reducing their price. The worst problems are on estates built in the Sixties and Seventies, where the design and build quality are poor It is a buyer’s market, but there are very few buyers.. Humber Court, along with a church, a former rectory and one other house, makes up the hamlet of Humber about five miles east of Leominster. Berkeley Homes, which targets the top of the new build market, reported a rise in pre-tax profits of 31 per cent this year.
Savills stresses how the quality sector has outperformed the mainstream. “Prime country houses have benefited from high growth concentrated at the top end of the housing ladder amongst equity-reliant buyers without mortgages. In November Strutt & Parker’s Exeter office sold five out of six properties for more than the guide price.Demand for family houses in the most popular villages and suburbs has carried on growing throughout 1995. Families are having to pay a premium for well laid-out accommodation, green space and good schools.
If they cannot find a period house to suit they are increasingly turning to the new-build sector. The Nationwide index for newly-built properties in the third quarter was up 7.9 per cent on 1994 while the general index was down 0.8 per cent.Quality is the key. Like most prosperous parts of the country, Hampshire has been bedevilled by a lack of period houses for the many families keen and able to buy In that particular niche it is a seller’s market. As the number of small households grows, this niche is expected to expand further in 1996.The family”On no, not another cash buyer,” was the estate agent’s lament when a couple arrived at his office in Winchester, Hampshire. The London chain Foxtons sold two flats near Clapham Common for premium prices in 1995.
