Just what we need. Another bit of bad mortgage and housing market related news.
The latest UK house price figures from Rightmove the property website, popped up on the internet early on Friday. The data had been scheduled for release on Monday. And the headline numbers didn’t do much to rein in the doom and gloom.
The September data, which ran from August 8 to September 8, shows a 2.6 per cent fall month-on-month for UK house prices, taking the annual rise in prices to 9.6 per cent from 12.8 per cent in August.
Except it’s not just ailing confidence and rate rises at work here - there’s some government bungling in the figures too.
The nationwide fall was exacerbated by a sharp drop in the number of larger properties coming to the market, as a result of the introduction last month of home information packs for houses with four-bedrooms coming to the market, said Rightmove. That effect is set to trickle down the market with the government’s announcement that the packs would also become compulsory for three-bedroom houses from September.
Other size brackets also saw a drop in new properties to the market with the lowest level of new properties overall since 2004, as sellers chose to hold off amid the uncertainty.
In London, the average house price fell 2.5 per cent to £384,439, from the previous month. Only the West Midlands managed to post a gain, of 0.9 per cent, from August to September.
