Escape to the country

For those hankering after the idyll of paddocks and stables, competition is fiercely stiff as the post-lockdown “race for space” takes hold.

- Madeleine Silver

“THE demand from buyers at the moment is quite phenomenal,” says Charlie Stone at Wiltshire-based agent Rural View, with some properties attracting 25 or more viewings in a 10-day to two-week period. “I’ve not seen demand like this for nearly 15 years, since before the 2007 financial crash.”

A year of lockdowns has seen Britons running for the hills – or some green space at the very least – and in November last year, Knight Frank reported that demand for prime country houses had pushed price growth to a four-year high.

“What we’re experiencing post-Covid is people reviewing their work-life balance. I just can’t see that people are going to be back in their offices from 8am until 6pm, five days a week, and so I think there’s only going to be more of a sustained demand for rural property,” adds Charlie, who has seen prices for what he describes as “the best houses” rise by 15 to 20% since March 2020.

As Rupert Sturgis at Knight Frank in Cirencester says: “Equestrian buyers are now up against people who maybe aren’t horsey, but they want a few acres, they want a cottage with a paddock, or they want a manor house with 10 or 20 acres so that they can have a bit of ‘the good life’.”

WHILE sprawling equestrian set-ups designed to be run as businesses with extensive facilities have been spared the inflation, it is properties that fit the bill of what buying agent Bobby Hall of Heaton & Partners describes as the “classic” request “to be on the edge of a village with access to a good school and a train, somewhere that is very private, perhaps with a cottage as well and maybe a couple of paddocks”, that buyers are scrambling for.