Guest blog by Gavin Pike MNAEA – Senior Sales Partner, Martin & Co Witney
Ask any economics student what determines price and the instant answer will be ‘supply and demand’. This is as true for housing as is for anything else from crude oil to bitcoin.
Critically for the house seller, some of these factors are beyond your control whilst others can be made to work in your favour.
One of the reasons prices are so high is that a very small percentage of the housing stock is available at any one time. Last year less than 4.24% of Oxfordshire’s housing stock was sold. In other words, any one Oxfordshire home comes to the market on average every 23½ years! Continue reading “What Determines the Price of your Home?”
As with so many festive traditions, the twelve days of Christmas leading to Twelfth night are familiar, even if their roots seem a little shrouded. Generally recognised as the period been Christmas day and the Coming of the Epiphany the period marked the traditional length of Christmas festivities. Pagan beliefs also explain the tradition of taking down festive decorations on Twelfth Night. These decorations often took the form of evergreen foliage (typically holly and ivy) and some believed that tree spirits sheltered in the decorative sprigs. Removing them either before or after Twelfth Night came to be regarded as unlucky as the disgruntled spirits would exact a toll in the following year’s crops! 
Interestingly, we’ve seen a surge in the availability of rental properties being offered in the local market. This is particularly acute in relation to 2-bedroom properties in Witney, there are now 48 listed TO LET of which 31 are flats. Once we ‘zoom out’ slightly, the picture is less worrying, with only nine 2-bed properties listed in Carterton, this is below the usual norm. Interestingly, supply currently exceeds demand for 3-bedroom houses too, but this should rebalance as families aim to move during the school holidays. Here’s the latest availability for properties in Witney to rent: 
