An understanding of people is the answer to this question.

It’s funny how the past two years have changed our perception of life. Although this article is about the pricing of rents and capital values of property assets, first I’m going to talk about the everyday things that we have all experienced during the past 18 months through the early part of this pandemic.

Quite understandably in lockdown, some of us started to feel that the enforced break from the rat race was an opportunity to move away from the consumer economy of wanting everything now. Instead, we started enjoying the free things in life: an appreciation of the countryside (for those lucky enough to be in locations where our daily exercise allowed such excursions), the mellowness of rest, the quietness of just being. But, sadly for everyone so blessed, there were others who found the whole experience stressful and distressing. Different people in different circumstances experience different things. That will always be the case. 

But there were some tangible observations about how people started to recognise the worth of the things that they bought and ‘needed’ in this the new normal. Again, I must preface this observation by noting that this definitely didn’t apply to everyone, but there were many households in the UK which had stable incomes, but with less expenditure on travel, going out or other recreational pursuits. In other words, they had an increase in their disposable income and a limited array of possibilities for spending. Of course, due to the uncertainty of the pandemic, people in such circumstances have increased their savings or cleared their debts, but there have been enough people who have simply transferred their expenditure to other avenues that were available to them and to other pursuits.