House prices down 2.7% in quarter, but up over year
Thursday 12th February 2009, 2:29PM GMT.
THE price of local housing dropped during the last quarter of 2008.
Figures released by the Policy Council yesterday show the average price for the quarter from October to December was £342,000.
That was down by 2.7% on the previous quarter, but still an increase of 3.3% over the year.
The last quarterly drop was -1.8% in the first quarter of 2008.
The increase at the end of 2006 was 11.1% up, and at the end of 2007 stood at 6.6%.
Keith Enevoldsen (pictured), a director at Martel Maides, said a downward trend in year-on-year prices was likely to continue.
‘Annual house price inflation is decreasing and has been for the last three quarters. It is coming down fast,’ he said.
Overall sales were down by 37% on the previous year – 163 local and 13 open market homes were sold during the three months – compared to 257 local and 13 open market properties sold over 2007.
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Looks like it’s finally time for vendors to be more realistic on pricing? The number of properties for sale is growing, and high end rentals are sticking due to lack of higher paid incoming workers and subsequent corporate lets. Anything over £2000 pm is now very hard to let.
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Here we go again! “It is coming down fast”, is Estate Agent code for, let’s try to panic those who are selling, so they start dropping prices more quickly so we do not have to reduce our pay, if we can make the market panic, then we are back ‘in the money’ as everybody falls over themselves to sell.
Whereas, perhaps the market will just stagnate, which would be the neutral action of many not needing to sell.
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As I’ve said before we really need to stop looking at house price averages and watch the number of transactions for a clearer picture of how things are going…176 properties sold in 3 months is around 13 a week…divide that by the number of estate agents and you can see how slow things are. Only a handful of these were open market so it looks like we can’t rely on the wealthy squirrels to keep our housing market buoyant, they’ve obviously got other things to do with their spare cash right now.
US property has slumped almost -35% in 12 months and the UK has declined overall by around -14% and although we might be sheltered from the worst effects of the global slowdown we have our own problems looming, especially if Deputy Jones gets his way with his “local jobs for local people” campaign as this will remove a large proportion of the high end local market sales (and the regular churn that keeps stock moving and prices rising) as the number of inbound licence holders are reduced.
I wonder how much the conge take has reduced year on year and how a prolonged slowdown in the housing market might scupper the States budget revenue forecast?
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The headline is actually wrong. Looking at the report, the average price of a house actually increased by 0.5% over the quarter and the average price of an apartment increased by 14.4% over the quarter.
The 2.7% “drop” is in “the median average local market residential property price”, and merely reflects that a greater proportion of apartments were sold last quarter.
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