The Decks, Runcorn… the road where people move the most
Fri 16 Nov 2018
Many folks say moving home is the most stressful thing. Moving home is like someone collecting all your worldly goods, putting them into brown boxes on a lorry, making your whole life look like an Amazon delivery van, only to spend the next six months unpacking it all, whilst unable to find important things like your bank cards, ‘those’ shoes or special jewellery!
We wish we could be instantly transported like in Star Trek – “Beam me up Scotty to a blissful moved in state”. Unfortunately, this fantasy scenario is confined only to the realms of science fiction, and the reality is more often, very chaotic!
Star Trek aside, when you decide to move and before the stress of living out of cardboard boxes for months descends; first you trawl the portals (Rightmove/Zoopla/On The Market) to find a new house, which out of the hundreds of properties available to buy, you will probably only view around four or five of them, for no more than 20 minutes each. Then, you will arrange a second viewing of one or two of those initially viewed properties for the estate agency industry stated average of 30/45 minutes maximum (fascinating when you think most people take hours to decide what clothes or shoes to buy but minutes to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on their next home!). Then you put your property on the market with an estate agent, find a buyer for your Runcorn property, agree on a price for both, then instruct solicitors. The property becomes sold ‘subject to euphuism’… sorry ‘contract’… as solicitors and surveyors and mortgage companies pick holes in the paperwork, threatening to wreck the chain at any moment. You can’t dare get too attached to the property you want to purchase in case the sale falls through! Phew – stressful or what??!!
Is it worth it? Worth the stress? The brown cardboard boxes? Well, many Runcorn people think so.
In the last 12 months, 629 families have sold and moved home in Runcorn (WA7)
The question I want to raise is, do people on certain streets in the WA7 postcode move more often than others? Well, the answer might surprise you. I looked at the Land Registry for the all the property sales going back 23 years (to 1995) in the WA7 postcode while also calculating the average value of a property on a particular street/road (to see if there was a correlation between price and moving). So initially looking at the top 10 streets in the postcode, in terms of pure out and out house sales, The Decks is the winner with an average of 11.61 house sales per year (since 1995) as on the graph below.
And to look at the bigger picture, the table below shows the top 25 streets, with the average value of a property on that street. As you can see, there is no correlation between the average value of a property and the number of times a property gets sold on that street.
| Street | Average Value of a Property on that Street/Road | Average Number of Properties Sold per Year (since 1995) |
|---|---|---|
| The Decks | £94,222 | 11.61 |
| Heath Road South | £121,350 | 8.83 |
| Halton Road | £111,155 | 8.3 |
| Old Coach Road | £97,239 | 7.52 |
| The Glen | £77,559 | 7.52 |
| Weston Road | £183,979 | 7.04 |
| Main Street | £147,297 | 6.7 |
| The Uplands | £73,987 | 6.39 |
| Linnets Park | £110,437 | 6 |
| Malmesbury Park | £246,032 | 5.83 |
| Littlebourne | £113,244 | 5.48 |
| Manor Fell | £131,923 | 5.3 |
| Greenway Road | £134,306 | 4.96 |
| Bridgewater Grange | £254,197 | 4.74 |
| Grangemoor | £83,377 | 4.7 |
| Oxford Road | £151,158 | 4.78 |
| Norleane Crescent | £132,279 | 4.35 |
| Ivy Street | £99,062 | 4.39 |
| Walsingham Drive | £284,100 | 4.26 |
| York Street | £86,799 | 4.17 |
| Boston Avenue | £104,093 | 4 |
| Chatteris Park | £219,758 | 3.83 |
| Picton Avenue | £113,196 | 3.96 |
| Roscoe Crescent | £83,719 | 3.74 |
| Dorchester Park | £224,780 | 3.65 |
However, I still felt the information wasn’t telling the whole story. Some roads in Runcorn have many more properties on than others, so I wanted to compare the average number of properties sold by the actual number of properties on that street, to find out the streets whose owners proportionally moved (or sold more often) than the rest of the locality.
In the next article, I will answer that question in great depth, and the results should (as they did me) certainly raise an eyebrow. The question is, do you live on one of Runcorn’s top 25 most saleable streets?
Come back to my Runcorn Property Blog for the next article to find out!