Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2012! The outlook of the year looks set to be very optimistic with lots of exciting activity surrounding the Olympics in the summer. Many Home owners and Landlords with property have already signed up with Agents to rent their home to one of the many companies that will besiege canary wharf in their thousands in a few short months’ time. This is sure to generate and inject a very positive start to our year with the natural hive of activity that will surround such a mammoth task. So what is really in store Olympics aside for2012? How will property prices fair, will the high rental yields be sustained for another year or will they level out? As most of you know trying to predict what the property market will do is like asking how long is a piece of string. Unfortunately we don’t have a crystal ball so can only make our assumptions based upon what’s happened in the past six months, and of course looking at what the lenders and the bank of England have in store with regards to interest rates; all of this will have an impact on how things will pan out. That said I think we will have another similar year to the last, I have confidence that rental yields will remain strong throughout the year as I still believe there will be more people renting than buying. I do however feel that quite a few first time buyers may become confident and dip their toe into the world of buying. I believe that low interest rates will be the biggest enticement and the fact that they have now had a good couple of years to save hard for that much needed deposit, I also think that many will be keen to secure something pre Olympics as who knows what the games will do to property prices later on in the year, historically many predict them going through the roof following an Olympic Event. House price data for the six years since London was awarded the Olympics, shows that property values in the areas nearest the Olympic sites have gone up by an average of £60,000 not bad considering the fragility of the market for the last three of those years. All in all I believe we will have nothing to grumble about in 2012 I think it will be yet another fairly static year but never the less an exciting one as London gets to host this exciting event!