There’s a question I get asked an awful lot.
How’s the property market?
It’s an understandable question, but after nearly forty years working in property I still struggle to give anyone a useful answer without asking another one.
Which property market?
This morning I was at the launch of the Kent Property Market Report. It’s the fifth year I’ve attended and I’ve come to value the morning more and more. Not because I leave armed with another collection of statistics to quote, we’re hardly short of those, but because it gives me a rare opportunity to step away from the individual homes, buyers, sellers and transactions that occupy most working days and look at Kent as a whole.
The figures this morning illustrated the problem with that simple question rather nicely.
Across Kent, average house prices fell by 2% between the second quarter of 2025 and the same period this year. Yet beneath that county figure some places were rising while others were falling. The difference between one part of Kent and another was quite considerable.
All of those things can be true at exactly the same time.
Nobody owns an average house in an average Kent location, being considered by an average buyer with an average mortgage. Real people own particular homes, in particular places, and make decisions for very particular reasons.
That’s why I’m always wary of the big property headlines. They aren’t necessarily wrong. They can just become pretty unhelpful when we try to apply them to an individual home.
What I also enjoy about the Kent Property Market Report is that residential property is only part of the picture.
This morning we heard about offices, industrial property, retail, science parks, housebuilding, regeneration and infrastructure. Once again, they aren’t all travelling in the same direction.
The residential market has been challenging and affordability matters. Mortgage costs matter. Housebuilding has slowed. Yet Kent’s science and innovation centres continue to attract businesses, parts of the industrial market remain remarkably robust and the very best office space is still capable of setting new rental records. High streets continue to change too. Some are struggling, some are finding new uses and some are seeing rents rise.
I find that interesting because it’s a reminder that property is really about much more than property.
The second part of the morning explored the emerging Local Growth Plan for Kent and Medway. Food production, energy, technology, ports, logistics, skills, education, transport, infrastructure and commercial space all entered the conversation.
Look at any one of those things in isolation and we probably miss the point.
Businesses need the right space. Businesses also need people with the right skills. Those people need homes. Homes and businesses need water, energy and transport. New development needs infrastructure. Town centres need reasons for people to be there. Employers need places where people actually want to live.
Eventually you realise that what you’re discussing isn’t simply an economy or a property market.
You’re discussing a place.
I’ve seen the effect of that during my own working life.
I remember the buzz as the M20 was being completed through Kent and the difference that improved connection made to perceptions of the places along its route.
I remember the same sense of possibility around Ashford when international trains arrived in the 1990s. Suddenly Ashford’s relationship with Europe looked different. Years later came High Speed and a much faster connection with London.
Geography hadn’t moved, but people’s perception of Ashford within that geography had.
Infrastructure changes movement. It can change where people are prepared to live, where businesses are prepared to invest and, over time, that change in demand can feed through into property values.
That’s why one part of this morning particularly caught my attention.
Ashford International is still called International, of course, but international passenger trains no longer stop there.
There is now a campaign gathering evidence of demand for international services to return to Ashford and Ebbsfleet. More than 20,000 potential journeys have already been registered.
If that’s something you would genuinely use, you can register the journey you would make.
Whether those trains return remains to be seen. And I certainly wouldn’t suggest that their return automatically means house prices go up.
But experience tells me not to dismiss infrastructure as something separate from property.
Roads, railways and journey times alter movement. Movement influences where people choose to live and work. Businesses react to connectivity too. Over time, all of those things can alter demand.
Perhaps more importantly, infrastructure can change how we think about a place.
After this morning I went back through the Kent Property Market Reports we’ve kept from previous years. We have them going back to 2018, and reading through them makes my fifth visit feel even more worthwhile.
In 2018 and 2019, Brexit and political uncertainty naturally occupied a lot of attention. Then came 2020.
That year’s report reflected on whether five or perhaps even ten years of change in the way we worked, shopped and socialised had been compressed into a matter of months.
A year later the unexpected race for space was well under way. People wanted gardens, more room and different sorts of homes. Kent house prices were rising strongly and housebuilders were trying to replenish their land supplies.
Then inflation arrived. Mortgage rates changed dramatically. The market slowed. Transactions fell. Working patterns continued to evolve. What people could afford changed again.
By 2024 the county-wide housing figure was falling, but once again some parts of Kent were rising while others were falling.
Last year the language had moved towards a cautious but stabilising market.
And here we are again.
What struck me reading those reports wasn’t that one year had been right and another wrong.
It was how easy it would have been, at almost any point, to believe that whatever was happening at that particular moment was simply “the property market”.
It never was.
People’s lives changed. The economy changed. Interest rates changed. Businesses adapted. Towns evolved. New places were built and old buildings found new lives. Some predictions proved right and others inevitably didn’t.
Kent remained Kent, but it certainly didn’t stand still.
Perhaps that’s what I’ve come to value most about attending this event each year.
Most days in our business naturally require us to look closely. At a particular home. A buyer. A viewing. An offer. A chain. A move.
Once in a while it’s good to do the opposite.
Stand on the balcony and look at the county as a whole.
See where people are living, where businesses are investing, where connections are changing, where places are struggling and where something new is beginning to happen.
Then, when somebody asks me how the property market is, perhaps I’m a little better equipped to give them an answer that’s actually useful.
Although I suspect mine will still begin with another question.
Which property, and where?
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