General

Over the last two years, we’ve seen pretty strong performance in the local market. We wanted to see how different property types have performed, so we indexed the values at the start of the period. Property data updates quite slowly, so we’ve estimated the last 3 months.

The average amount of time someone lives in their property in Headcorn or Bearstead is actually 19 years.

Nobody ever spent their last days wishing they’d spent more time in the office. However, most of us have our nose to the grindstone to make ends meet and our area is no different. This chart shows how long the working week is for people here. The EU working time directive prohibits employees working more than 48 hours per week.

Provisional data from HMRC shows that 105,630 property sales went through in October 2020, the highest number recorded in a single month since 2016

We define the premium properties as those with a price in the top 5% of all local houses. Likewise we define the super-premium end of the market as the top 1%. This chart shows those prices points in the context of the mid market.

The socio-economic profile is a telling measure of the constitution of people in a local market. We have to be careful when talking about the economic profile of local residents because no statistical measure will really illustrate the character of an area. However, we’ve used the governments ‘NS-Sec’ classification data on our area, which defines local residents in those terms.

This chart shows the most recent split of the number of people buying flats as opposed to houses, as well as the last ten years’ worth of data. This is useful information for anyone with an interest in the local market because it affects the overall market dynamic.

By looking back over the last eight quarters, it’s quite enlightening to see how average sales prices have changed for individual house types. Obviously, the bigger types sell for more, but the quarter-on-quarter changes tell an interesting story.

Since 2009, the highest quarterly price growth in Snodland, Larkfield & West Malling was during Barack Obama’s first term (a rise of 14% in Q1 2011)

The profile of wealth is a fairly good gauge of the day-to-day reality of residents in terms of the local housing market. The government has drawn attention to the large numbers of people in the country who are ‘JAM’s or ‘just about managing’. This chart shows the profile of our area based on their socio-demographic profile.

The property market fluctuates on a seasonal basis, and this is particularly the case for sales rates. This chart shows how the market has changed over the course of the last few months. The mix of property types doesn’t present any great surprises, but it’s interesting to see the month-on-month changes visualised.

Over the last ten years, the total rate of price growth for flats has been 59.4 per cent, compared with 34.8 per cent for houses.