TPP353: 2019 predictions reviewed

This week on The Property Podcast, The Robs are starting to round up the year by taking a look at how their 2019 property hotspot predictions have stacked up. Were they bang on? Or were they completely off the mark? If you didn’t listen to Rob & Robs predictions at the beginning of the year, then you can listen to that episode here.  So let’s dive right in…  Top 5 cities: At the beginning of the year Rob & Rob predicted that Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool would be the best performing cities in England.  Were they right? Well they got four out of five right which is pretty good going, with only Nottingham letting them down, but it only just missed out on the leaderboard coming in at sixth place. UK on average:  Rob B predicted that the whole UK market wouldn’t creep into negative territory, but it would sit somewhere between zero and 3%. Whilst Rob D said that there won't be anymore than 1% growth nationally.  Did they get this one spot on? Listen to find out.  London: At the beginning of the year Rob D’s thoughts were that London would continue to be the worst performing region, whilst Rob B agreed but also threw the South East into the mix as well, and said he could see them falling into negative equity.  You probably already know the answer to this one - did you agree with their predictions at the start of the year? Let us know! Brexit:  The dreaded ‘B’ word that everyone has been tip-toeing around this year. Back in January, Rob B thought that no politician would be bold enough to push through a no-deal Brexit and that we would be leaving the EU with some form of deal.  This one is technically still undecided so there’s time for it to go one way or the other, but what The Robs definitely didn’t predict is that we would be no further along than what we were at the beginning of the year.  Transaction Volumes: Following on from Rob B’s Brexit prediction, Rob D seemed to think that off the back of Brexit this year we would see lower transaction volumes than we did in 2018. Luckily for our industry, Rob D was wrong on this one! Although the annual data hasn’t yet been released, some months were higher than the previous year but some were incredibly lower. So on average it seems like transactions were probably lower than 2018, but we can’t be 100% sure.  Markets and Media And to finish of the 2019 predictions, Rob B called that this year would be pretty boring for all markets and he didn’t see the property market surging or crashing. But he did call that the media would be incredibly negative.  We think we can say Rob B pretty much hit the nail on the head with those two.  Looks like The Robs did pretty well on this years predictions. They got four right, one half right and one wrong. Not bad going.  Find out more by listening to today’s episode and let us know what you think on our social channels. And what will be Rob & Robs predictions for 2020? Well luckily you only have a couple of weeks to wait!    We’d love to hear what you think of this week’s Property Podcast over on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. You might even have a topic you’d like us to cover in the future - if so, pop us a message on social and we’ll see what we can do.   Make sure you’ve liked and subscribed to our YouTube channel where we upload new content every week! If that wasn’t enough, you can also join our friendly property community on the Property Hub forum. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.