House prices ‘still rising’ say figures
Thursday 13th November 2008, 2:29PM GMT.
GUERNSEY house prices are still rising, according to figures released by the Policy Council yesterday.
The average cost of a local market house between July and September was £351,500 – up 1.9%, an annual increase of 15.6%.
That may be bucking the downward trend seen in the UK, but quarterly sales are down 33% on this time last year and open market sales have fallen by more than 50%.
‘Sales are substantially down on last year – and that was not an exceptional year,’ said Martel Maides director Keith Enevoldsen, who was surprised by the figures. All the indications around at the moment are that house prices are not increasing,’ he said.
Mr Enevoldsen (pictured) said one of the problems with statistics such as these was that it took, on average, 10 weeks to complete a sale and that skewed current figures.
The third quarter saw 180 local and 11 open market sales, compared with 269 and 23 respectively in the same period last year.
For the first time Guernsey house prices are higher than the average in London, which stands at £325,132.
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Don’t these figures merely show that less houses were sold but the houses that did sell were of a higher value?
If the above assumption is correct then this is very different from saying that the “average cost of a local market house” has risen.
If on the other hand the above assumption is wrong and average houses prices really are higher, then it must show how out of touch Guernsey house buyers are with the UK /global real estate situation.
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I’ve always been wary of these figures as the calculation appears rather simplistic, certainly too basic to be worthy of such a bold (and misleading) headline.
If only one house is sold then, whatever price it is sold for, it becomes the average…if no houses were sold in the period would the average property value be zero?
Surely the sample size is far too small for any meaningful conclusion or to go comparing it with London.
The real barometer of the market is the amount of housing stock currently for sale and how long it is sticking… I imagine this analysis would generate a very different headline and story.
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What is the median price – that is the price at which 50% of homes sold above and 50% below? The average price can be relatively meaningless. The average can be skewed in a place like Guernsey where the pool of properties is relatively small and there are large variations in price.
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