Forecasting Prices Isn’t Easy – Who Predicted the UK Property Boom? (Not Me …)

Sadly, my mother passed away last month, aged 93.  A broken hip, covid and pneumonia all hastened the end, but “frailty due to old age” was probably a fair enough cause on her death certificate. So we have started the process of selling her property, a bungalow, in Sherburn, an ex-mining village near Durham. I met the valuer from the estate agent last week, and he talked about the market situation and what has happened over the last 18 months.

“When lockdown started last year, we had a team meeting”, he told me. “I said to my boss, this is going to be a disaster! No-one is going to want to move during a pandemic – prices are going to crash”.

Of course we all know that he was wrong, and my new friend was very thankful for what has actually happened.  He gave us a valuation some 15% higher than it would have been 18 months ago and is confident the property will sell quickly. (Just to make potential home buyers in most of the UK envious, we are still only talking £150K for a three bedroomed detached bungalow).

The point is that I don’t remember any experts predicting a property price boom in early 2020. Of course, the UK government helped with its reductions in stamp duty and now schemes to help first time buyers. But even so, there seems to have been a surge in people assessing their lives and homes. Many have reconsidered where they want to live, and the importance of having a garden for instance has gone shooting up the priority list. The valuer said that flats and apartments were not sharing in the bonanza in quite the same way, even larger examples, and he had clients who had been locked down in such properties who were desperate to get into something with even a small patch of land of their own.

It is not just property prices of course that have surprised most of us. Timber prices have risen sharply due to a triple hit of high demand, HGV driver shortages and climate crises, reports Supply Management.

“The Timber Trade Federation (TTF) said suppliers have faced a post-pandemic “surge in demand” for timber this year, leading to the average import price of softwood increasing by 50% between January and May – a situation which is expected to continue”.

This is another example of the power of markets to surprise us. Even the experts get it wrong – in fact, it sometimes seems that they get it wrong more than the non-experts! And that applies to the markets that we deal with as corporate procurement people too. No matter how much analysis you carry out, how many numbers you crunch, the variables that aren’t predictable can screw up the best-researched forecast.

That might be human behaviour, which largely explains the housing boom, or it could be the weather in the case of crops for instance, or political upheaval, or even a pandemic. The “unknown unknowns” or black swans can cause havoc with our plans, and even smaller issues can disturb specific markets.  In my book I quote the famous Rowntree Mackintosh cocoa market disaster, which cost the firm huge amounts of money when they got their forecasts wrong for that commodity’s forward prices.  

So we have to consider all the facts if we want to avoid market-related “bad buying”, and think hard about less obvious risks. In some cases, we can use advanced techniques such as hedging to protect against future cost increases, and mechanisms such as long-term contracts to guard against shortages (but of course getting locked in to long term contracts with unfavourable conditions is a risk in itself!)

Carrying out scenario analysis, which looks at various “what ifs”, is another approach that can be valuable. Certainly, considering a range of possible events and outcomes is better than simply working on the basis of a single prediction of the future.  But this is one of the most difficult challenges procurement faces and no one can pretend that it is easy to forecast what is coming next. Let’s face it, if it was, we would all have bought timber futures, a second property and a large stock of PPE back in 2019!