New listings on portals plummet to under 10% of previous levels

One of the first analyses of portal listings since the start of the Coronavirus crisis shows that new listings have plummeted from a peak of 8,535 added per day earlier this year to just 672.

The average number of views per listing has also dropped considerably, along with the number of new home seller leads which are down to four this week, compared with this year’s peak of 82 in late February.

Search volume of buyer and seller keywords on Google are also down 54 per cent and 62 per cent respectively since the middle of February.  

The analysis has been undertaken by agency comparison website GetAgent, which pulls data from the major portals: the 672 figure was taken from Monday of this week, April 6.

It has created a ‘dashboard’ depicting market activity in real-time and updated each day.

The dashboard also includes GetAgent’s market sentiment surveys of both home sellers and estate agents. So far this has received 1,592 responses from home sellers and nearly 200 from estate agents.

Some 88 per cent of agents who responded have chosen not to conduct in-person valuations while social distancing measures are in place.

More than half of the agents surveyed have furloughed over 81% of their employees, while 68 per cent had also significantly reduced advertising and 50 per cent described themselves as “extremely concerned over cash flow in the next month.”

The brighter side is that 55 per cent still expect to make progress on some sales, with 16 per cent expecting to make progress on all of their current active sales. Some 60 per cent of agents have also continued to market at least 90 per cent of their existing properties. 

In terms of sellers’ responses, 42 per cent of potential vendors ranking their concern 10 out of 10; meanwhile 46 per cent of buyers said they would not put an offer on a property under current conditions.

The spread of the virus has caused many to reconsider, with 29 per cent of those planning to sell delaying by at least four to six months, with a further 28 per cent expecting delays of between seven months and more than a year.  

However, 76 per cent of all respondents still plan to take their property to the market within the next year, despite the current restrictions.  

The dashboard, along with the agent and homeowner sentiment surveys, can be seen here.