Market Comment from Lee Fenn-Tripp, Director of Downer & Co
1,826,560 People use Newbury Train Station a year How does that affect the Newbury Property Market?
It might surprise you that it isn’t always the villages around West Berkshire or the swankiest Newbury streets where properties sell and let the quickest. Quite often, it’s the ones that have the best transport links. I mean, there is a reason why one of the most popular property programmes on television is called Location, Location, Location!
As an agent in Newbury, I am frequently confronted with queries about the Newbury property market, and most days I am asked, “What is the best part of Newbury and its villages to live in these days?”, chiefly from new-comers. Now the answer is different for each person – a lot depends on the demographics of their family, their age, schooling requirements and interests etc. Nonetheless, one of the principal necessities for most tenants and buyers is ease of access to transport links, including public transport – of which the railways are very important – I will talk about bus routes in another article..
Official figures recently released state that, in total, 2,502 people jump on a train each and every day from Newbury Train station. Of those, 1,322 are season ticket holders. That’s a lot of money being spent when a season ticket, standard class, to London is £5,460 a year. (Incidentally a further 792 join at Thatcham).
So, if up to £7.22m is being spent on rail season tickets each year from Newbury, those commuters must have some good jobs and incomes to allow them to afford that season ticket in the first place. That means demand for middle to upper market properties remains strong in Newbury and the surrounding area and so, in turn, these are the type of people who are happy to invest in the Newbury buy to let market – providing homes for the tenants of Newbury…
The bottom line is that property values in Newbury would be much lower, by at least 3% to 4%, if it wasn’t for the proximity of the railway station and the people it serves in the town
And this isn’t a flash in the pan. Rail is becoming increasingly important as the costs associated with car travel continue to rise and roads are becoming more and more congested. This has resulted in a huge surge in rail travel.
Overall usage of the station at Newbury has increased over the last 20 years. In 1997, a total of 967,326 people went through the barriers or connected with another train at the station in that 12-month period. However, in 2016, that figure had risen to 1,826,560 people using the station (that’s 5,018 people a day) and I can only see that increase with the electrification of the line in 2018.
The juxtaposition of the property and the train station has an important effect on the value and sale -ability of a Newbury property. It is also significant for tenants – so if you are a Newbury buy to let investor looking for a property – the distance to and from the railway station can be extremely significant.
One of the first things house buyers and tenants do when surfing the web for somewhere to live is find out the proximity of a property to the train station. That is why Rightmove displays the distance to the railway station alongside each and every property on their website.
If you want to know what (and what would not) make a decent buy to let property in Newbury, then one place for such information would be the Newbury Property Blog. Please visit www.newburypropertynews.co.uk view our pages on Facebook or pop into our office in Cheap Street in Newbury.
