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Conveyancing Portal Reports Strong End of Year Following Brexit
This article is an external press release originally published on the Landlord News website, which has now been migrated to the Just Landlords blog.
An award-winning conveyancing portal, SortRefer, has reported a strong end of the year following June 2016’s Brexit vote.
Conveyancing Portal Reports Strong End of Year Following Brexit
The firm witnessed an upward swing in conveyancing activity after the shock of the Brexit outcome had dissipated.
The number of users on the conveyancing portal rose by 4% by the end of 2016, following a dip caused by Brexit uncertainty. In the two months after the Brexit vote, conveyancing business dropped, but, by November, overall instructions had increased by 5% over the pre-vote figures.
In line with the latest data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), SoftRefer reports a significant increase in remortgage instructions, which rose by 19% in the six months following the vote.
Buy-to-let instructions were up by 6% over the same period, suggesting that landlords are still keen to purchase investment properties ahead of the forthcoming reduction in mortgage interest tax relief.
According to the firm’s Kevin Tunnicliffe, 2016 was the year of surprises in the property market.
He says: “We should have realised that if Leicester City could win the Premier League title, then anything was capable of being overturned and so it transpired. The result of the Brexit vote, no matter on which side of the issue you stood, was a complete surprise. After the initial shock and the realisation that the world had not stopped spinning, activity came back to normal for us and, in fact, we ended the year very strongly.
“I think pundits will be very cautious about their predictions for 2017 after what happened in 2016. As the CML is suggesting, only a small percentage increase in likely lending levels this year, I think that is a clue to how we should all view the prospects for 2017.”
Indeed, it will be interesting to observe how the forecasts change and develop following Theresa May’s crucial speech on the UK’s Brexit strategy on Tuesday.
