That wasn’t in the script.....

June 14, 2017 by Rob Kahl

That wasn’t in the script.....

Last week I wrote about the upcoming general election. I obviously focused on the main 3 parties housing policies and how the differed.

As I said, they didn’t really differ that much and all of them had nice soundbites and quotes. I thought that all of the campaigns were quite interestin; Jeremy Corbyn for Labour had probably the best showing, but I think we all expected a bit of a Tory landslide (especially Theresa May).

What transpired was a monumental cock up on the part of the Conservatives. Having promoted ‘strong and stable leadership’,  what we now actually have is a Prime Minister who is hanging on by a thread (at least at the time of writing this, who knows in the next couple of days).

This comes at a time when we are due to commence our negotiations with the EU to leave. The bureaucrats in Brussells must be rubbing their hands, its going to be like lambs to the slaughter. The Tories obviously took for granted what they thought we were all thinking.

I think we are all a bit fed up with politicians fobbing us off with jargon and misdirection and whatever you think of Labours policies it seems obvious that Jeremy Corbyn is a man of principal and seems to speak from the heart. He has definitely appealed to the younger voter with headline policies like the abolition of tuition fees and with the Conservaties shooting themselves in the foot with their core older vote with policies on social care, it was a bit of a double whammy on their part.

Whether Theresa May stays on we will have to wait and see. Her campaign was mainly based on her strength but ducking out of the T.V debates and robotically repeating Tory party strap lines made her seem anything but. If she wants to stay on as PM her only hope is that nobody else will challenge her as surely nobody in their right mind would want the job?

5 years of negotiating with the EU, the DUP in Northern Ireland, SNP in Scotland, balancing budgets for the NHS and education as well as cosying up with Labour backbenchers to get any policies through does not sound like the sort of job advert that would get many applicants.

As I have said a million times before, the housing market will rumble on like a large juggernaut and areas such as ours are well placed to ride out any storm or possible downturn. What markets like ours and so many others don’t like is the uncertainty that is has become 'now' and will be hanging over us for some time.

We've already had the upheaval of Brexit which apparently is going to take a couple of years but now we have a non-majority government and a weak leader it could be even worse.

Like I said, here in Leigh-on-Sea we will be just fine. We have things like the great commute in to London, excellent schools, thriving Broadway and beautiful coastline. These things will never change and there will always be plenty of people that need for various reasons to move to our area.

There will also be plenty of people that will want to cash in and move out of the area to cheaper places.

As estate agents if prices dip a little it doesn’t really make a great deal of difference to us, the same as if prices rise slightly. We rely on a volume of business to keep us going (and the number of other estate agents in our town!). If people are nervous about the next few years and decide not to move then we could have a problem.

I am confident though that we will be OK, we were expecting the market to dip after the Brexit vote, nothing happened, we were expecting a slowing of the market during the election, nothing happened. It seems like the housing market, at least in Leigh on Sea is bullet proof (lets hope I have not jinxed it!).

This article is by Rob at Scott & Stapleton
Tel : 01702 471155
To read Rob's previous articles please click here