House Price Index October 2023 (Zoopla)

[Twiglets1]

Key points:

• UK house price inflation has slowed from +9.6% a year ago to -1.1% today
• House prices are falling in 4 in 5 local housing markets
• Strong regulation of mortgage lending has protected the market but household buying power remains low
• UK house prices will fall 2% during 2024 but rising incomes will improve affordability
• There will be 1 million sales in 2024 but this could be higher if mortgage rates fall back towards 4%

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/property-news/house-price-index/

I’m a Londoner so fully aware of the market realties here. Hence why I said try but there are cheaper parts of outer London & obviously flats aren’t necessarily bad it just depends eg age when buying, dc or not & whether you even want to “climb the ladder”.

I guess they are “only “ falling in 4 out of 5 local areas (according to the House price index link I posted) not 5 out of 5.

Your village probably has something extremely desirable about it or maybe lots of nice things!

I’m afraid it has none of those things which is why these houses haven’t sold for eighteen months.

@Twiglets1 is that 2% fall accounting for inflation in the linked article? I can’t tell

Lol - oh dear!

Unfortunately it's impossible to separate economic and housing market predictions from political manipulation.

There are deluded sellers in every market (there is one local to me that didn’t sell at £1.25m, so they relisted with another agent… at £1.4m. Yes, I’m sure the problem before was that your house was too cheap).

The bigger problem locally is that there just isn’t much coming to market. We are hopefully exchanging soon, if this sale falls through there is literally nothing else on the market locally at the minute. We last put an offer in about a year ago, and that seller changed their mind about moving.

You can watch him (Richard Donnell, Zoopla) explain it here. But it is a bit of a hotchpotch method.

I did read this. It sounds like nonsense to me

"UK house prices will fall 2% over 2024, assuming mortgage rates fall to 4.5% by the end of 2024 and remain there into 2025."

How can the falls in 2024 be dependent on something that happens in 2025? Am I misunderstanding this?

It's so interesting, I'm a Brit living in sydney, and started my search to buy 18 months ago just before the rate rises began.

There were headlines everywhere about the mortgage cliff, and expected property crash which has never materialised.

The AFR published an article yesterday about how the market is being propped up in part by the parents giving large deposits to their children.

They have predicted a 7-9% increase in property prices for next year.

Everyone seemed to have hung onto their properties with their savings, and with inflation wages are obviously increasing.

Rates are expecting to peak in the next six months, with a possible couple of more increases and then will start to go back down, triggering another increase in property prices when they do.

It’s going to depend on whether people will be forced to sell due to being unable to pay their mortgage when their fixed rate ends and also the Help to Buy scheme is supposedly another bubble ready to burst as people may not be able to pay the loan back alongside their mortgage.

As I posted elsewhere, the number one driver is real wage growth. If that doesn't happen, or there is a recession, then prices will fall.

Nominal, so probably -10% in real term if that mean anything to you. I don’t doubt Richy has great integrity and so forth, yet Nationwide and Halifax both pointed to 5% down from peak, so it sounds like Zoopla complex model is undershooting in the unusual market.