Anything that needs renovation or updating is especially tough to sell and price reductions are rife. A four-bedroom detached house with a swimming pool in St Mawgan has had its price cut from £1.5m to £1.25m between July and February.
Other sellers reacting to the market are the owners of a two-bedroom cottage – also in St Mawgan – reduced (twice) since December from £525,000 to £499,000; and a six-bedroom detached house on the Lizard Peninsula with a price reduction of £55,000 – from £750,000 to £695,000 between August and December.
Duncan Ley, of the estate agent Humberts, says: “We need more buyers. The market is improving but has some way to go – it will take two years to return to normality.”
Explaining the rise in properties coming on the market, he says that some vendors have been waiting out the frenetic post-Covid boom, loath to try and buy in such a competitive climate – and then were deterred by high interest rates last year.
Josephine Ashby, of John Bray & Partners, has just agreed an off-market sale on a holiday home in Polzeath for £3m for a family. “Part normal seasonal bounce, part pre-election urgency, it definitely feels like a buyer’s market,” she says.
Ireland says for families looking in the £500,000 to £1m bracket there’s still a shortage of suitable homes for sale. For those struggling to afford a family home for much less than that, the locations with the smallest affordability gap – where local wages are weighed against house prices – to buy a terraced house in Cornwall in 2022, were Camborne, Looe-Pelynt, St Austell Bat and Bodmin, according to research by the University of Exeter.
There is speculation that changes made in the Budget – a reduction in the higher rate of capital gains tax (CGT) on sales of residential property from 28pc to 24pc, and the abolition of extra tax reliefs for holiday lets that aren’t available to private rentals – might reverse the trend of people buying to profit from holiday lets.
Ashby says: “Perhaps the decrease in capital gains tax and the increased sting on furnished holiday rentals might push some wavering sellers into action, but it’s too early to tell.”
Dean Lonergan, of Jackson-Stops, adds that in some areas there is a glut of supply: “There are certainly more apartments coming on to the market in Newquay.”
There is a huge supply of holiday lets in Cornwall – but also huge demand. In February there were 16,295 available holiday let listings in the county, a rise of 18pc in a year, and 48pc more than in 2019, according to the analyst AirDNA. Demand for these properties has increased even more markedly, up 26pc in a year, and 185pc since February 2019. That suggests the staycation trend is not over – and owners may still balance their books.
Renting out holiday homes has become much more of a 12-month season in Cornwall, increasing the chances of making a profit even as reliefs are cut.
Buy-to-let investors are selling rather than buying, says Joanne Ireland of Relocate to Cornwall, a buying agent. “In Falmouth, for example, three-four-bedroom houses in their £300,000s used as student lets.”
“Landlords are getting out and we have zero enquiries from new ones,” says Jonathan Start, adding that the proposed end to section 21 notices is another factor, plus the prospect of a new Labour government. “We are not seeing any holiday let owners selling up yet.”
