It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to Shakeel Adli, CEO at Zunikh.
Zunikh currently has an office in Sheffield and as such is constantly monitoring the market in Yorkshire (and nationally given we operate nationwide). That said, we believe it is important to look at local market predictions in the context of the national (and even international) landscape. This is because it is often the case that micro market conditions are driven by global events.
Noting that 2023 has been a particularly unusual year following on from Covid and with the continuing war in Ukraine, we expect that 2024 will see markets begin to settle. We can already see inflation beginning to ease and with this we expect that interest rates will slowly come down. Within the property market we anticipate that this will ultimately result in private sales picking up as consumers recover from higher costs of living and the cost of borrowing comes down. This will be aided by likely reductions in the costs of building and building materials, again attributable to the easing of inflation which may bring the price of stock down in the short term. Markets like Sheffield and South Yorkshire should benefit from this and housing prices may start to increase fractionally as demand for stock grows.
We also anticipate that build-to-rent schemes will continue to be popular amongst institutional investors in places like Sheffield and in the region generally given the strength of the rental market, however yields may start to drop as more consumers return to the private sales.
Our outlook for 2024 is generally positive and we expect Sheffield and the surrounding region to reap the rewards of this in due course.
