Mr. Charts
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Thanks Skim.
I hope you're having a great US day too ;-)
So, from that most esteemed site which everyone should subscribe to, namely moneyam:
START
House price minestrone set to continue
Jonas Crosland
It may be too early to predict a slump or a recovery
The UK housing market saga is set to run and run, with each week that passes providing further contradictory evidence on what is actually happening to the price of houses. The temptation is to cherry pick through the facts to underline a particular school of thought. Taking a look at multi-million pound flats in Chelsea will provide a different story to the fortunes of a detached house in the Midlands.
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) maintains that UK house prices declined in the three months to March, having already fallen in the three months to February, thus providing the first back-to-back fall in prices since 1996.
Its survey for the three months to April is due for release tomorrow, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the report will simply perpetuate the gloom of the previous two.
However, consumer confidence in April was still affected by the Iraq war and the introduction of higher National Insurance contributions. Since then, things may have changed.
Rightmove, the property website, has pointed out that 110,000 properties came on the market in April and the same amount was sold, hardly the behaviour of a market on its knees.
Estate agents on the ground are reporting a rise in transactions, but here again, there is a strong regional element. Rightmove claims that house prices fell 1% between April and May in London, dragged lower by Chelsea and Kensington, while prices in the north of England jumped by 4.4% during the same period.
Some will argue that this is the standard ripple effect spreading out from an overheated market in the South East. However, this time there are differences. The average number of people per household is expected to drop from 2.4 to 2.1 by 2025, while planning permission constraints will continue to strangle the flow of new housing stock. None of this takes into account a rising population, more divorces and more people living on their own.
And to top it all, rising demand will increase the number of new housing completions required each year to 300,000 against a current average of 195,000. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott wants to see 200,000 new homes in the Thames corridor alone, and where there is demand, it is hard to see values dipping by much.
At the other end of the scale, The UK housing market is set to crash over the coming years with prices falling by up to 20% from their peak, according to research published by economic consultancy Capital Economics.
The real path is likely to be somewhere between the two, but a serious slump in house prices seems unlikely.
END
I hope you're having a great US day too ;-)
So, from that most esteemed site which everyone should subscribe to, namely moneyam:
START
House price minestrone set to continue
Jonas Crosland
It may be too early to predict a slump or a recovery
The UK housing market saga is set to run and run, with each week that passes providing further contradictory evidence on what is actually happening to the price of houses. The temptation is to cherry pick through the facts to underline a particular school of thought. Taking a look at multi-million pound flats in Chelsea will provide a different story to the fortunes of a detached house in the Midlands.
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) maintains that UK house prices declined in the three months to March, having already fallen in the three months to February, thus providing the first back-to-back fall in prices since 1996.
Its survey for the three months to April is due for release tomorrow, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the report will simply perpetuate the gloom of the previous two.
However, consumer confidence in April was still affected by the Iraq war and the introduction of higher National Insurance contributions. Since then, things may have changed.
Rightmove, the property website, has pointed out that 110,000 properties came on the market in April and the same amount was sold, hardly the behaviour of a market on its knees.
Estate agents on the ground are reporting a rise in transactions, but here again, there is a strong regional element. Rightmove claims that house prices fell 1% between April and May in London, dragged lower by Chelsea and Kensington, while prices in the north of England jumped by 4.4% during the same period.
Some will argue that this is the standard ripple effect spreading out from an overheated market in the South East. However, this time there are differences. The average number of people per household is expected to drop from 2.4 to 2.1 by 2025, while planning permission constraints will continue to strangle the flow of new housing stock. None of this takes into account a rising population, more divorces and more people living on their own.
And to top it all, rising demand will increase the number of new housing completions required each year to 300,000 against a current average of 195,000. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott wants to see 200,000 new homes in the Thames corridor alone, and where there is demand, it is hard to see values dipping by much.
At the other end of the scale, The UK housing market is set to crash over the coming years with prices falling by up to 20% from their peak, according to research published by economic consultancy Capital Economics.
The real path is likely to be somewhere between the two, but a serious slump in house prices seems unlikely.
END
