James Lawson is playing the waiting game. Lawson, 43, who runs his own
insurance business in the City, has been looking for a house in the country
for more than 12 months, but after spending hours searching online and
countless weekends driving around the countryside, peering in vain at estate
agency windows and trying to catch up on the latest property gossip in the
village pub, he still hasn’t had an offer accepted. “I should have started
looking two years ago,” he says ruefully.
Lawson is not alone. Tens — or perhaps hundreds — of thousands of people
living in London, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne and Birmingham, indeed in
any built-up conurbation in England and Wales, share his dream of relocating
to a house in the country this year.
Like many, Lawson wants a farmhouse within commuting distance of the capital.
After four years living in a three-bedroom Victorian terraced house in
Battersea, south London, he and his wife, Fiona, 42, and their two children,
Rose, 2, and William, 7 months, are looking for a house that will be their
home for at least the next decade — somewhere with just a little more space,
a place where they can hear birdsong and see stars at night.
“We’re not after the typical Georgian rectory, but just a nice house with lots
of space, close to a town,” says Lawson. “It is about a lifestyle. We want
to be able to leave the kitchen door open in the summer and have kids
running in and out to a large garden. Ideally, we want five bedrooms and
five acres — space to plant some trees and keep a few sheep.”
Lawson, whose budget is £1m-£1.5m, describes the househunting process as
“challenging”. Only six suitable houses have come to the market in the past
year; three looked good enough to book a viewing, and he made an
unsuccessful offer on one.
He has “smelt the area” in west Essex that he wants to move to, just over the
Hertfordshire border from Bishop’s Stortford: he knows the right and wrong
villages and where the flight paths, pylons and pig farms are, to make sure
that when the right house comes up, he can move quickly.
“If you look in an estate agency window in Battersea, you can see 20 or 30
properties,” he says. “But in the country, there is only one or two a week,
sometimes not even that.”
Take Combe Hill. When the Regency country house with seven bedrooms and 43
acres near Honiton in Devon came on the market in early January, “all hell
broke loose”, says Will Morrison, a director of Knight Frank’s country house
department. The agency sent out 110 brochures in two weeks and had 24
viewings. Almost half the prospective buyers made the 315-mile round trip
from London to view it. Another five were from the southeast. There was a
bidding war, and the successful buyer spent £600,000 more than the £1.9m
asking price to secure the property.
Morrison describes the market in the southwest as “storming”. “We haven’t been
this busy this early in the season for five or six years,” he says. “There
are 20-30 viewers per property and half of them are London-based. Some
people are renting houses in the area because they can’t find the house they
want.”
The great migration to the countryside started in earnest in the early 1980s
and has snowballed ever since. Last year, 105,000 more people moved from
urban to rural areas than moved the other way, revealed the inaugural Report
of the Rural Advocate, published by the Commission for Rural Communities in
October. It also found that between 1985 and 2005, the population of rural
England grew four times faster than that of urban districts.
The greatest rise in those years was in East Cambridgeshire, where the number
of people grew by 38.7%; north Dorset (31.1%) and east Northamptonshire
(30%) also experienced large increases, while in the east of England, the
East Midlands and the northwest, population levels were up by less than 1%.
The biggest change has been the increase in the number of 25-to 44-year-olds
abandoning cities for a new life in the shires, whether it is high in the
Yorkshire dales, in the lush farmland of the Cotswolds, among the steep
hedges of Devon or out on the flatlands of Lincolnshire.
Dreweatt Neate, an estate agency with 14 branches in the south of England,
estimates that it has 100 people actively looking for a house in Hampshire,
Berkshire and Wiltshire, all of whom want a couple of acres and have £1m-£3m
to spend. Cooper & Tanner, which has nine offices in the West Country,
says it has 1,174 applicants seeking a period family home in the area; when
one comes up, 20 or 30 serious buyers will do battle and sealed bids are an
increasingly popular way to settle the sale.
Savills estate agency, which has 2,800 applicants looking in Surrey, Hampshire
and Oxfordshire for houses costing more than £2m, has seen the number of
buyers registering in the home counties almost double compared with this
time last year, from 12.8 per property to 22.9.
“The number of potential buyers to the number of houses available shows an
acute imbalance between demand and supply,” says Yolande Barnes, head of
research at Savills. “It is particularly acute in the southern part of the
country. Prices in the country rose 10.7% in 2006, compared with just 1% in
2005, with houses in the prime home counties outperforming the rest of the
market, rising 14%. We predict similar growth this year.”
This desire to swap the city smog for fresh country air provides lucrative
business opportunities. Last week saw the launch of Country House, a free
glossy magazine pitched at Londoners who are bored with chintzy decor and
photographs of people in green wellies and Barbour jackets, but still dream
of upping sticks to the countryside. Backed by Annoushka Ducas, founder of
Links of London, and Mark Esiri, chairman of Smythson, it will be plopping
through the letterboxes of the top 70,000 homes in the capital, from Notting
Hill to Battersea and Chiswick.
Bob Bickersteth, managing director of The London Office, based in Pall Mall,
which provides a shop window for 34 out-of-town estate agencies, with 171
offices from Cornwall to Northumberland, judges the demand to be so great
this year that it held a Move to the Country show at Battersea Arts Centre
last Thursday.
“Buying a family house in the country is difficult and getting increasingly
difficult,” says Bickersteth, whose clients have on average £600,000-£1.5m
to spend. “The reason is simple: there are too few houses coming onto the
market, we are not building any more suitable houses and demand is growing.”
This year Bickersteth has noticed a new phenomenon that he believes is
exacerbating the problem. “People are struggling to find a sufficiently
large house in London, and rather than move to Balham, Wandsworth,
Earlsfield and the like, as they would have done five years ago, so they are
now considering moving out of London altogether.
“More than 50% of our applicants start looking in the home counties,” he says.
“The majority of people are looking to buy between the A3 and the M4, in
Hampshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. The most popular patch of country goes
out beyond Salisbury down to Castle Cary and up to the Cotswolds.”
Nor is it confined to the southeast. “The thriving business activity in
northern cities, such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle, has boosted the
local economy, and we are seeing many more families looking to sell up in
the suburbs and relocate to the country,” says Arthur Young, head of George
F White’s Durham office, who sells property from mid Yorkshire up to the
Scottish borders. “There is keen demand for large family houses, but fewer
and fewer houses are coming to the market, and there are more buyers after
them.”
So if you still want to join the great exodus, how can you beat the competition?
First, be realistic about what you can afford. Property prices in the
country have risen substantially in the last few years: do not expect to be
able to swap your two-bed flat in Wimbledon or Victorian terrace in the
suburbs for a large family house in the shires.
“The north and Wales have seen the strongest price growth for family houses
over the past five years,” says Liam Bailey, head of residential research
for Knight Frank. The agency found the price of a detached family house on
Anglesey, for example, has risen 133% since 2001 to £204,000. The average
detached family house in Surrey now costs £515,049; Lincolnshire, at
£189,614, is the only county with an average price below £200,000.
So, if you can’t afford Berkshire (£386,207) or Oxfordshire (£411,270),
consider Bedfordshire (£293,557) or Leicestershire (£254,073), and why not
look at the next stop on the train line or motorway junction further out
from the capital.
Nor should you be too inflexible about the kind of property. Don’t get fixated
on buying a Georgian rectory: be open to consider something newer instead.
The property is too small? Look into whether you can extend it. Not enough
land? See if you could buy some from a nearby farmer.
Your approach, according to Henry Holland-Hibbert, managing director of Lane
Fox’s country house department, should be summed up in one word: compromise.
“You used to be able to sell a small house in town and buy a bigger, better,
more presentable house in the country,” he says. “But however big you think
the countryside is, the houses in demand — detached family houses — are few
and far between. So if you can tick seven of the 10 boxes on their wish
list, go for it, even if it does mean moving further afield or compromising
in some other way, such as accepting less land or fewer bedrooms.”
It can also help to be in the right place, at the right time. You can call or
visit all the estate agents in your chosen area, weekly, if not daily to get
to the front of the queue. Or, you could sell up in the city and rent in
your chosen area first.
With so many people chasing too few country properties, this can give you an
important edge by allowing you to move more quickly once you find a suitable
property. You will also be plugged into the local rumour mill and know who
is likely to be selling before the property is even put on the market.
Which is exactly what Richard and Madeleine Waters, both 39, from Wandsworth,
southwest London, did when they wanted to move to the country in 2004. They
rented a house near Bath, which only put them in prime househunting
position, but also meant they and their three children, Jessica, 7, Ben, 3,
and Emily, 22 month, could testdrive life in the country.
Even though Richard’s job as a property finder gave him an advantage, it still
took months of dedication, and they ended up buying a “not so attractive”
modern house for £515,000 in Wellow, their favourite village on the edge of
the Cotswolds, rather than a period property in a less desirable location.
“I love that the walk to school is a five-minute stroll down a lane rather
than a busy London street,” says Madeleine, a public relations consultant.
“The local shop means we hardly ever have to get in the car, and we can
enjoy all the good things about being in the countryside — the beautiful
environment and nice atmosphere — while feeling part of a village rather
than stuck out in the sticks.”
The Waters, who are now busily extending into the loft to get the living space
they wanted, are happy with their home in the country, but is not always so
simple a transition. If you do not put in sufficient research, you could end
up being unhappy in the country — but unable to afford to return to town.
Louisa Fletcher, managing director of Propertypriceadvice. co.uk, an online
buying service, believes that many buyers who are convinced they want to
move to the country are really only looking for a bigger garden.
Fletcher is speaking from personal experience. She used to live in Teddington,
southwest London, but decided five years ago she wanted to leave the city
and return to her rural roots. She knew the New Forest well, so she bought a
place just outside Fordingbridge in Hampshire.
“Six months later I was going insane,” she says. “What I hadn’t reckoned with
was how very rural it was. If I’d thought more carefully I would have moved
to a market town.” So she sold up and has a crashpad in town and a smaller
country home for the weekend.
If you don’t want to put all the legwork in yourself, and can afford it, it
may be worthwhile employing a buyers’ agent. Also known as search or
relocation agents, they should save you time by filtering out unsuitable
properties and mean you only go and see ones that really fit your
requirements. Fees vary from a flat £250 to £1,000 or could be a percentage
of the sale price.
If you still can’t find the house of your dreams, then you should consider
building your own. Self-building remains a niche market in Britain, but
growing numbers of people are taking the plunge. Not only will you end up
with exactly what you are looking for, you are also likely to be sitting on
an instant profit. Catherine Monk, editor of Build It magazine, estimates
the average self-build, once completed, is worth about 30% more than the
price of the land and the build cost put together.
But will the current mismatch between buyers and the number of houses for sale
in the country continue? James Mackenzie, a director of Savills’ country
house department, is not convinced — and sees more properties coming on to
the market before June 1, when sellers will be required to provide a Home
Information Pack, at a cost of £500.
“Talk of a housing shortage is a bit of fear-mongering,” he says. “I think the
market is starting to relax, and lots more houses will come on this spring.
“Our Bristol office made 67 pitches in January. That is 67 people wanting to
know how much their house is worth. That is at least three times as many as
in the same period last year.”
Give yourself a head start
- Be realistic about what you can buy Prices in the country have risen
substantially in the last few years; don’t expect to be able to swap your
two-bed flat in Battersea or modest Islington terraced house for a large
family home in the shires
- Be flexible about area If you can’t afford Berkshire or Oxfordshire, try
Gloucestershire or Warwickshire instead, and so on, across the country. Look
at the next stop on the railway line or further junction on the motorway
- Don’t become too fixated by the idea of a Georgian rectory It may be
everyone’s ideal dwelling, but there are not that many of them about — a
fact reflected in their price. Be ready to settle for something more modern
instead
- Rent in the area before buying This will not only help you to move more
quickly — it will also give you a chance to check out the area and hear
about properties coming up for sale. It will help you judge whether country
life is really for you, too. You might actually be happier staying in the
city, after all — and just want a bigger garden
- Employ a buyers’ agent It will cost you money (either a fixed fee or
percentage of the sale price), but means you won’t waste time visiting
unsuitable properties. The agent should also save you money by negotiating
the price
- Get your skates on With so much competition between buyers, you must move
quickly once you spot your dream home. That means having your finances set
up and using an efficient solicitor
- Think outside the box Despairing of ever finding anything suitable? Buy a
small house you can extend — or even build your own. Not only will you
actually get the home you want, the finished product should worth at least
30% more than the land and build cost put together
Click
here to see house prices county-by-county — and how much they have risen in
five years
Additional reporting by Lucy Denyer and Jane Padgham
Country House magazine, www.countryhousemaga-zine.co.uk;
The London Office, 020 7839 0888, www.tlo.co.uk;
Tilford Woods, 01252 792 199, www.tilfordwoods.co.uk
