Was Bruton a media hype? Part one, the locals

A couple of years ago I wrote about Bruton, at a point when several national papers had decided it was the most fashionable town in the country. The purpose of that piece was to review the reviewers, and to gauge how people who actually lived there felt about the change.

Was it hype, or were the papers right? Two years on, here is what I found.

The locals

I spent a while going back through the Bruton Facebook pages to see whether opinion had moved. It had not settled into anything like agreement. On most subjects it was split down the middle.

One example: a new business generated a long thread, in which one man's main concern was the traffic it would bring, and another thought it would add to the town's charm. Both of those are reasonable positions and they cannot both be acted on.

That split is part and parcel of a town's rise. The question is what is driving it.

Are outside buyers pushing prices up?

This was the concern under most of the others, so it is worth looking at properly rather than repeating.

House prices in Bruton had indeed peaked, going by the sold prices, but they had also had troughs, and there were significant peaks before Hauser and Wirth arrived. The arrival of a gallery is a convenient story, and convenient stories are usually doing less work than they appear to be.

There is also a measurement problem that gets ignored. Average price rises when more houses sell, and in a small town a handful of higher-value sales moves the average a long way. Some of what people were reading as a market shift was the people selling, not the people buying.

The honest answer is that you would need two things to settle it: how much migration into the area had actually occurred, and how that compared with average house values over the same period. Neither was in the Facebook threads.

Where the panic comes from

A lot of this worry was being generated and amplified on social media, which does both good and harm to a small community. It spreads a useful warning quickly. It spreads an unfounded one just as quickly, and nothing ever comes along afterwards to correct it.

Were the fears about house prices valid? At that point, I did not think so. But the jury was out, and I said so.

First published in September 2017. Edited since: the Rightmove chart that carried the price argument has gone with the other images, so the numbers are described rather than shown, and the trailer for the next article has been replaced with a link to it.