Twenty Twenty Vision - Delving into Data 17: Sale vs. Rent

As part of our recently published National Homemover Audit for Q2 2017, we analysed the Sale vs. Rental split for properties in cities across the UK with the largest number of properties overall. In this post, we look at additional analysis to drill down further into the property market across two of these UK cities.

Outside of London, the city of Manchester has the highest ratio of rental to sales properties currently available out of the 9 biggest UK cities (by largest number of properties), closely followed by Newcastle. Other key stats include:

• 41% of the property market in Manchester is rental property, in Newcastle it’s 39%. The UK average today is around 23%
• In Manchester, rental property has been on the market for 113 days on average with an average asking price of £843pcm. Interestingly, both of these are under the national averages of 130 days and £1100 respectively. This may suggest that while rental property is in relatively high demand - lower than average time on market - there seems to be a cost-of-living glass ceiling that rental asking prices are struggling to break through. With this in mind, the rental market in Manchester is reasonably buoyant, but buy-to-let investors may consider looking elsewhere for better yields.
• In Newcastle, the average rental property has been on the market for 175 days and will cost around £650pcm, both stats which are largely over and under the national averages respectively. In fact, Newcastle is 4^th in the list of least in-demand rental areas in England, and 6^th in the UK list.

Here is the district breakdown of the Manchester rental market by postcode area. The size of each bubble represents the number of properties available in its respective postcode districts:

From this analysis we can see that in Manchester, M14 has the largest number of properties available and is on average one of the more expensive postcode districts. In contrast, the cheapest and one of the lower average time-on-market areas is postcode district M38.  

To read more of our Delving Into Data property insight posts, click here. For more information about TwentyCi's property and home mover data provision and insight solution, or any of our other services, please call 01908 829300 or email enquiries@twentyci.co.uk. 

You can also download our complete TwentyCi National Homemover Audit for Q2 2017.