2019 was another exciting year in real estate here in London and I am going to take sometime and break down some of the numbers for you. It is important to understand what it actually means, to help us look forward into 2020. If you love numbers, then you are going to love this video.
Diving into the numbers
Let’s start by jumping into the number of sales - the actual number of houses that sold in 2019. We want to know if they’ve gone up or down, how it compares historically, and the areas are that had more sales than others.
We saw 6,607 homes change hands in London proper. To give you a sense, that is the third highest we have seen since we started recording the stats back in the 80’s, only topped by 2016 & 2017. (See Table 1.1)
Table 1.1 - Number of Sales vs. Primary Year
If we look back over the past ten years, our lowest sales were around 5400 homes sold, and our highest in 2017 at 7500 homes sold. So, a 2000 home variation. Why is that important? (See Table 1.2)
Table 1.2 - Sales vs New Listings
The battle of Supply vs. Demand
Well, we see that the number of new listings have steadily been decreasing over the past ten years and the number of sales have been increasing. Inventory continues to decrease while overall demand is growing. If we look specifically at 2019, we see that around 75% of all new listings are selling. This is the stat that would indicate we are in a market that favours sellers.
Let’s take a quick look at how home sales were broken down by each area. At some point, West London was exiled and so we have London broken into three areas.
Map of London with Number of Sales for 2019
We can see that London North had the highest number of sales, and East London actually had the fewest sales. I will leave that for now, as I will explain why that is important when we look at price in these areas in the next video.
Overall, 2019 was reminiscent of what we saw in 2017 & 2018. Check out the next post where I break down what happened with London home prices.