With everything on hold for the last months, it’s given everyone time to think and reflect on their priorities and what they want in life. It’s also brought up a variety of issues for people, such as a lack of garden space/outdoor space and how that can have an impact on people’s physical and mental wellbeing.
When the market starts getting back to normal, here at Home EA we think buyers will be looking for slightly different features or re-prioritising certain things that they might not have thought about as much before the UK lockdown.
Let’s take a look at some of the trends we’re noticing:
Office Spaces
A large number of people who usually work in offices have had to adapt to working from home for months on end. This has its challenges for people that might not have the space or find it difficult to limit distractions.
Who knows how big the transition from office working to home working could be – a lot of employers will have been impressed with how quickly employees have adapted and might be keen to cut costs by downsizing office spaces.
Buyers could look for a property that has a good-sized room for a home office, or even a space in the garden that could accommodate a shed or garden room for home-working. They could also look for potential for planning permissions for extensions, loft conversions or basements.
Outdoor Space
Undoubtedly a factor that has been on almost everyone’s minds throughout this time has been outdoor space. At the beginning of the UK lockdown, it was advised that people only went out once a day for exercise, which is always an incredibly strange thing to remember. This really brought society’s relationship with nature and outdoor space into focus.
For some people, if they had their own garden, it was a reprieve from staring at four walls all day and they could exercise, garden and generally get the benefits of being outside, especially for people shielding. If people don’t have a garden, then proximity to local green spaces to exercise in or have a break in has been equally important, but it’s a postcode lottery. We think people will be more and more inclined to move to placed with good green-space links or garden capacity.
Being outdoors has become an increasing luxury and we don’t think that people will forget anytime soon how instrumental to our physical and mental wellbeing being able to enjoy it has been.
Commuting
If companies do decide to shift towards home-working then buying properties based around commuting distance may not be as much of an issue in the future. Instead of being tethered to a workplace, if you can work from home for half of the week, a longer or more complex commute might not be as much of a burden or a disadvantage.
This will allow buyers to have more choice and a broader range of properties if their commuting distance isn’t as much of a factor and something that holds them back from buying a better property.
For more advice or info, get in touch with our team today.
