A record month in May

May as mentioned before was a record month for us.  Homelet who do all our referencing reported that we were in their top 15% nationally for the number of references they carried out for us in the month of May.  (and looking at the invoice that has just come in I can well believe it!) Considering how many businessess far far larger than us we know use Homelet this is an excellent result.

There has been a drop in enquiries seen for the start of June, however talking to other agents too, there seems to be a lack of valuations and landlord instructions at the moment. We have let virtually all our houses and not much new seems to be coming onto the market.

Houses by the nature of the tenants they attract make much more longer term tenancies than flats do, which have a far higher turnover of tenants.  Houses in the school catchment areas and close to good road links/town centre also do well.  We have a pretty healthy managed portfolio of properties still with the original tenants in these houses so one can assume that houses make longer term homes for people and this perhaps explains the lack of houses on the market presently.  The current economic climate and general uncertainty could also be making people stay longer where they are until there is some stability out there again.

We recently had a number of high-end houses to let at above £1300pcm and all of these flew out of the door very quickly and we are still getting enquiries for these. There are, it seems, still a lot of people out there with really good budgets looking for quality family homes which are not coming onto the market!  Certainly the viewers looking at our top end houses reported that there was very little on the market locally.

I can only speak for Cheltenham/Gloucestershire market but currently there seems to be a big tenant demand for houses and reasonable demand for flats.  Certain properties in this town will always do well by their very nature and location especially the period properties (which is essentially part of the Cheltenham "charm").

We really could do with a lot more houses coming onto the market

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