The CC&C office is now closed to visitors, but we’re still working from home. We can open the office for essential visits like key collections, we just need a little notice to get there. We have gloves and things to make any handovers safe in accordance with government advice.

Here’s the detailed lowdown:

The highlights are:

No physical viewings, obviously, but we’re working on providing walk-through video tours of as many properties as we can safely do.

No physical valuations, but we can give pretty accurate advice remotely via Facetime or WhatsApp or similar.

The office numbers and emails are all being covered all day by staff working from home.

Existing sales can progress as normal and current (26/3/20) government advice is that completions and removals can go ahead with proper precautions.

Let properties will be managed as normal. Current advice is that contractors should only visit for essential repairs, not general maintenance.

Do get in touch if you have any questions.

But we can keep it almost business as usual, with some precautions.

We’re following the Government guidelines to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 by temperature checking each morning, washing our hands at every single opportunity and cleaning our work areas frequently.

For those clients who are still looking to arrange valuations or to place their property on the market we are still carrying out these appointments and will do so for as long it is safe to do so and clients would like us to.

We are currently able to provide a normal service to tenants and landlords and expect that to continue.

Estate agents, just like real people, have a habit of winding down a bit in December. Why not? We’ve worked hard all year and it’s always a quiet month anyway so why stress about it? Enjoy the quieter times. Go home a bit early every now and then. Heck, why not take a cheeky Christmas shopping day?

But we were a bit worried about December 2019. When we all sat down and looked at the prospect of a general election and all the surrounding political noise we feared the month might end up horribly quiet, so we decided to bite the bullet and redouble our efforts. If the market was going to be quiet, we’d better make sure the few people out there who were looking to buy viewed and bought our clients’ properties. And if other agents were resting a bit, we might be able to sneak a half-decent month.

It worked out rather well.

According to Rightmove’s data, the same 3 Cambridge offices usually jostle out 1^st to 3^rd position in terms of most sales agreed in the area and it’s usually pretty close, but for December it was definitive who worked the hardest. We managed to find buyers for 28 of our clients’ properties, followed by 19 for the second place office and distantly trailed by the rest, all at 10 or fewer.

We’re chuffed with that.

Looking at the data in detail, it backed up our suspicion that the month would be quietish overall – a total of 239 sales were agreed in December, against 398 in November, a drop of 40% – but our sales level barely slipped at all.

We like to think we work harder and get better results than other firms do. It’s nice when the stats back it up so definitively.

I’ve been saying it for a while: Now is, without doubt, the best time to buy a property in the 20 years I’ve been doing this job.

4 years ago getting hold of a house round here was a deeply challenging experience. You had to call within an hour of it going live online to make sure you were in the first 30 requests, view it within the first week at the exact time the agent stipulated, for a maximum of 15 minutes, and then make an offer the next day. If you didn’t comply with any of these you’d miss out to someone hungrier than you. Such was the flurried panic you didn’t have time to worry about minor details like whether you actually wanted it, all you knew was that if you didn’t buy this one, the next one would be £20k more. You just had to buy something. Anything.

Not so today. Today you can view something, think about it properly, view it again, ask pertinent questions and wait for the answers, look at what else has sold around to make sure the asking price is fair. Then make a carefully considered offer. If the seller doesn’t want to take the offer you can walk away and wait for something else. It’s altogether a more comfortable process.

So make the most of it. Because it won’t last.

In the last 4 years we’ve seen selling prices stabilise and rental prices rise. As the rush to buy subsides people are happy to rent for longer, comfortable that selling prices aren’t rising and they therefore aren’t falling thousands behind the market every month. Lovely.

Except that it’s not really very lovely renting a property in the UK. A big worry is that you have the lack of certainty of tenure that our rental laws bring, meaning you might have to pack up and ship out at fairly short notice, but it also costs you money every month. Take an average £400,000 3 bed semi here in the people’s republic of Trumpington. A 90% mortgage of £360,000 can be had for around 1.8% at the moment, which is an interest payment of £540 per month. The same house to rent is about £1400 per month. So if you’ve been renting that house since June 2016, waiting and watching and carefully considering whether to buy something now, you could have been paying £860 a month off your mortgage instead of to your landlord. That’s £10,320 a year. Making, at the time of writing, a total of £34,400. Which is a lot. (It’s actually more than that, as you pay off the mortgage the interest drops, but the sums are too hard for this estate agent to work out.)

As more and more people spend longer and longer renting, more and more will get to the point where these calculations trouble them. And more and more will get to the point where the need to feel completely settled overtakes any concerns over the housing market. We’re now three-and-a-half years post-referendum, remember, so there are people out there who were just a couple in June 2016 that are now a couple with 2 children. Life moves pretty fast, even if Brexit doesn’t.

Housing market slow downs happen regularly and what usually happens afterwards is a sudden, sharp rise as all of the pent-up demand comes bursting out. When it does there’s every chance it will be just as competitive as it was 4 years ago, maybe even more so. We’ve not seen job numbers in Cambridge shrink, quite the opposite, nor has the volume of available housing increased by a significant factor. So the supply and demand balance hasn’t changed, nor have interest rates. What’s changed is confidence and confidence will return, one day, possibly very soon. All you need to do is work out what day that will be and make sure you buy a house the day before.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.