It’s often said that the price of UK property doubles every ten years – but is there any real truth in this statement?
Interestingly, at this moment in time on the market is a property adjacent to a house I considered buying for myself back in 1998. Whilst one example won’t give us the answer to this question, it does hint at the trend seen in the UK property market.
Twenty years ago almost to the day, the property next door to the house in question was on the market for £100,000 – I clearly remember the details and the specifications handed over by the estate agent. The two properties are identical. Today, this property is up for sale at £400,000. That’s an increase from £100,000 to £400,00 in twenty years.
It might be considered that in the first 10 years, the price of this property rose from £100,000 to £200,000, and then in the second 10 years, from £200,000 to £400,000 pounds. In this particular example, the figures are spot on.
But is this same trend true of all properties in the UK? Of course, the answer is no.
Taking a look at the statistics from Nationwide, it can be seen that back in 1952 for example, the average price of a property was around the £1,500 mark, and at the back end of 2017, the average property was around £211,000.
Let’s calculate the growth rate. If properties were to have doubled across the board on average across the whole of the UK every decade, then we would need to see a growth rate of 7.2%. It’s this growth rate that would lead to a doubling in price every 10 years.
However, if we consider the statistics by Nationwide, then £1,500 in 1952, rising to £211,000 in 2017, is not actually a growth rate of 7.2% but rather 7.5%.
Is this a surprise? Not really, property is cyclical and not consistent – sometimes property prices go up much faster than others, and other times they go down. As a result, it’s unrealistic to say that property prices double every actual 10-year period.
But, if we were to look at the trends over a longer period of time, for example over fifty years, it can be seen that prices do double on average every 10 years.
The two properties that I mentioned above and which are not far from where I live today, actually show this in practice, and whist this may not be the case for every property out there (after all, the growth rate does fluctuate across the UK), it is true that prices in the UK double every ten years ON AVERAGE.
Over the next few posts I’m going to be taking a look at this in a lot more detail and will also be considering why there’s so much confusion around what makes house prices in this country increase.
Here’s to successful property investing
Peter Jones B.Sc FRICS
By the way, I’ve rewritten and updated my best selling eBook, The Successful Property Investor’s Strategy Workshop, which is an account of how I put together my multi-property portfolio, starting from scratch and with no money of my own, and how you can do the same. For more details please go to ThePropertyTeacher.co.uk