Reasons to be positive! The mini budget of late September 2022 is now over a year ago. I was in holiday in Turkey at the time! It didn’t ruin my holiday, but it did make me fearful of what I would arrive back at my desk to in both the short, medium, and long term. The short term wasn’t too bad. The fact that interest rates had risen meant that many buyers wanted to see their purchases through to keep the low fixed rates they had been offered rather than pulling out due to the uncertainty created. The medium term…well by the time I was back at my desk it was October and October 2022 in terms of new sales agreed at Aldreds was ‘OK’. We exceeded by one sale our target for the month. We expected November and December to be slow and they were. The long term has been more challenging with 2023 so far being a year where the volume of sales has fallen back to levels seen about a decade ago. However, looking at October 2023 against October 2022 there are reasons to be positive. We have a very strong Gorleston Office that covers most of the NR31 postcode. In the first 16 days of October 2022 31 sales were agreed in the NR31 postcode. So far this month there has been 38 sales agreed. An approx. 20% increase. OK this is a small window, but it shows that things may have very much found a level. In the words of Winston Churchill after the battle of El Alamein – This isn’t the end, it isn’t the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning!