Savills suffers fall in sales in London, country and ...

Savills has reported strong figures for the first half of 2017 across its worldwide activities, but its UK residential divisions have bucked the trend with significant drops in sales.

In a trading statement to the City the high-end agency says the first six months of 2017 were always likely to compare unfavourably with the same period of 2016, when there was a surge in transactions ahead of the stamp duty surcharge on additional properties.

However, it also points out that transactions in May and June 2017 showed an improvement on the same two months of 2016, when business was muted ahead of the EU Referendum.

So Savills says that its UK resi fee income fell by four per cent in the first half of this year to £55m - last year’s comparable figure was £57.2m.

In the second hand sales market, Savills overall transaction volumes were down by three per cent in London and six per cent in the country market.

The average value of London residential property sold by Savills in the period was £2.7m (last year it was £2.5m) while in the country the average price of a home sold in the first six months of this year was £1.1m (last year it was £1m).

Sales of new homes dropped six per cent from H1 last year.

“Increased levels of political and economic uncertainty created by the General Election and the ongoing negotiations to leave the EU make it difficult to predict market volumes for the rest of the year” warns the agency.

Underlying profits for the UK resi side of Savills’ business fell 27 per cent to £5.4m - a year ago the comparable figure was £7.4m.

Across all of its activities - UK and worldwide, including commercial activity - Savills pushed up its pre-tax profit by 27 per cent to £32.4m in the first half of this year.