The Wednesday open market in Louth

Louth is a “rum” place. In the local Lincolnshire parlance “rum” is frequently used to describe something puzzling, slightly odd or quirky: in this case the conundrum is how the town has fared so well in the recent turbulent property market conditions.

It might have been expected that a small community in eastern England, in a county that many Britons struggle to pinpoint on a map of the UK, might have been hit hard by the economic downturn. Yet, despite having no railway station and being almost 30 miles from the nearest motorway, the property market in Louth and its surrounding areas is, according to Rupert Fisher of estate agency Savills’ Lincoln branch, holding its own when compared with some better known and better connected areas.

And, in some cases the town is outperforming them. “We’re doing very well in this area,” Fisher says, comparing his patch with those of colleagues within the Savills network. “There are other areas that aren’t doing so well, but equally there are areas that are doing as well as we are.”

He ascribes this relative success to incoming homebuyers, who account, he estimates, for up to 40 per cent of his recent buyers – “We’ve had people coming from Shakespeare country [Stratford upon Avon], Essex, Sussex [both in south-eastern England], London and Ireland” – and have been attracted by the value for money the properties offer.

To illustrate this he cites Aswardby Hall, a large country mansion in the rolling landscape of the Lincolnshire wolds, a designated area of outstanding natural beauty. It offers grand reception rooms, 10 bedrooms, staff accommodation, extensive gardens with a lake, a six-hole golf course, a two-bedroom cottage, stables and outbuildings. The guide price is £1.35m, a sum that would buy a two-bedroom, one-reception room flat in Chelsea, central London.

The Aswardby Hall, priced at £1.35m

He has also recently marketed Loxley House, in the village of Keal Cotes. Valued at £499,950, its features include three reception rooms, four bedrooms, established gardens with a lake, a workshop, a hangar and a landing strip for light aircraft.

“In the past few months the price band between £300,000 and £500,000 – up to the stamp duty [property tax] threshold – has been very busy,” Fisher says. “Then it has been dead between £500,000 and £1m. And if we have been able to take on a nice house over £1m they’ve been going quite well because there are some big cash buyers that have been waiting and now they seem to be ready to spend. March, April and May were fantastic months for us. In May we had one of our record months in terms of new deals – but we needed to because we have some serious catching up to do after the beginning of the year.”

Value for money was a decider for Dianne and David Robinson, who recently moved to a newly built, four-bedroom detached house on the edge of Louth. The couple lived in the village of Wynyard, Teesside, north-east England, until they decided to move to Beverley, East Yorkshire, to be nearer their daughter. But after six months of house-hunting and living in rented accommodation, visits to friends in the Lincolnshire town persuaded the 61-year-old National Vocational Qualification assessor and her 58-year-old husband, a site engineer in Immingham, to move their search area about 50 miles further south.

“We couldn’t find anything we liked in Beverley and thought the properties were overpriced,” Dianne Robinson explains. “Louth is a small town but it’s got everything. The people are very friendly, there are plenty of pubs and restaurants and it has a lot of specialist shops.”

The town’s retail profile was one of the characteristics – along with its architecture, compactness and lack of traffic congestion and gentrification – that attracted journalist Nick Louth, 51, one of the FT Weekend Money section’s My Portfolio columnists. He first visited on a mission to see the place with which he shares a name and moved into a three-storey, three-bedroom town house with his wife, a countryside ranger, about eight years ago.

“People say it’s like shopping in the 1950s because you can get pretty much everything by going to the little local shops,” he explains. “There are seven butcher’s shops, two greengrocers and three places to buy wet fish. Where else has that? You can actually discuss with the owner of the shop why he chooses the fish he does and how he likes to cook it. If you go to a supermarket you’ll find half the time that the people behind the counter normally do the butchery and don’t know the difference between scaling a fish and skinning it.”

The town has recently rejected plans to build a large supermarket on the site of its former cattle market and seems determined to maintain a spirit of non-conformity – which, among other things, supports a non-chain department store, an independently run cinema and Fulstow, a new microbrewery – as well as its quality of life.

“I have a client who lives in London but comes up to Louth once a month to shop in our butchers and delis and cheese shop and the like,” explains Phil Stevens of estate agency Turner Evans Stevens. “I think the charm of the place is the key. The town has retained an awful lot of its appeal. The Georgian part still has a great deal of character. Unemployment doesn’t seem to be too bad around here and so the market is not particularly affected by it. House prices have dropped in line with everywhere else in the country – 15-20 per cent – and we are suffering as much as anybody else from the lack of mortgage funds but we are not particularly dependent on one type of property or price band. The lowest priced property we’ve dealt with over the past six months has been about £55,000, for a one-bedroom terraced house or flat, and the most expensive about £750,000, for a substantial five-bedroom, detached house with a bit of land.”

And Stevens too suggests that far from being a characteristic that puts people off the town, the perceived remoteness of Louth is counting in its favour.

“The crime rate here is low, the traffic problems aren’t as bad as they are elsewhere and schooling tends to be good. Lincoln [about 25 miles to the west] is a very attractive city from a shopping point of view and you have the cathedral. I think it’s on a par with York. The quality of life in and around Louth is pretty good. It’s a nice place to live and a nice place to bring up children.”

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Estate agencies

Savills, tel: +44 (0)1522508900, www.savills.co.uk
Turner Evans Stevens, tel: (0)1507601633, www.tes-property.co.uk