house sales
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Purplebricks hits back at analyst’s report that it only sells half of listed properties.
Purplebricks has rebuffed a report issued yesterday by City investment analyst Jefferies which claimed that the company only sold approximately half of all the properties it lists for sale, and advised investors to sell their shares in the company. The Jefferies report, while praising the rapid rise of Purplebricks, criticised the company for not revealing how many houses it really sells and that, sellers who were not successful using their service had already paid up-front for the service. Analysts at Jefferies also wondered what would happen if the “model stumbled” when consumers realised the service they pay for isn’t a guaranteed sale. The revelation prompted a steep decline in the company’s shares yesterday, which dropped in price by 7.5% on the AIM stock exchange during brisk trading. Single month Purplebricks says the data used by Jefferies to make the claims was based on just a single month’s trading and “does not include properties that have completed but have yet to be uploaded to the Land Registry,” the company says in a statement this morning. It also says its full-year trading remains in line with expectations. The hybrid agent also says the data used did not include properties that had exchanged,…
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House sales in ‘structural decline’ says Barclays
A city analyst working for Barclays believes house sales are in ‘structural decline’ in the UK. The comments by Jon Bell (pictured, below) come in a note sent to City investors yesterday in which he says the number of homes sold in the UK peaked in 1989 and have been declining ever since. Reason for the decline, the equity analyst says, include the increased number of homes owned by buy-to-let landlords, who tend to buy and sell properties less often than home owners. Bell points out that government’s own figures highlight how private home ownership has barely changed since the early 1990s while the extra housing stock made available since then has been swallowed up by private landlords. Bell also says the higher cost of Stamp Duty, a lack of new public and private housing and the UK’s ageing population, who tend to move less often than younger families, is also depressing sales. Bell, who works at the high street bank’s investment banking arm in the City, also proffers some more surprising reasons for the UK’s declining number of house sales. He says the government Help to Buy scheme for new homes is helping younger buyers purchase larger homes, and…
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Sellers cause 61 per cent of house sales to fall through
Which? Magazine finds that sales collapse due to a ‘change of heart.’
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