Here’s an interesting graph from Nationwide’s latest house price index (June) showing the decline in the amount of property currently on the market.
It’s using data from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and it doesn’t need a huge amount of explanation: basically, since the credit crunch, stock levels in the sales market have plummeted.
In RICS’ [...]

Here’s a little something that’s bound to upset the folks over at housepricecrash.co.uk.
It’s from the last Land Registry report (actual sold property prices for March) and it may well be a very early sign that the housing market has hit the bottom and is starting to turn upwards.
Although house prices in England and Wales have [...]

Interesting interview with Robin Bew of the Economist Intelligence Unit on cantosTV.
Bew sees some signs of improvement and reckons we may be close to the bottom, a sentiment that echoes a lot of the recent commentary on the housing market.
Oh, but hang on (cough) - I’m feeling a little feverish. Could that be swine flu? [...]

Well done to the FT’s excellent Alphaville blog for spotting an interesting chart in the Nationwide’s quarterly report – one that suggests house prices are just a hair’s breadth away from returning to their long-term trend.
The diagonal line is the long-term trend; the drunken squiggly one plots how house prices have deviated wildly from the [...]

When markets fall people get nervous, sit on the sidelines and wait for things to bottom out.
Calling the low point of a market is, however, very tricky, which is why most experts will tell you that the best possible scenario is to buy close to the bottom – better to make a small short-term loss [...]

No, it’s not a regular blog posting (yet), but to be quite honest, with the amount of dubious data out there it easily could be.
The questionable claim that has caught my eye on this occasion comes courtesy of a survey into the saving habits of first-time buyers.
Finance site Fairinvestment.co.uk surveyed around 2,500 individuals and found [...]

I read with some interest that Brixton Estates’ Tim Wheeler is quoting Bob Dylan:
“The apocalyptic opening lines of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower seem to capture the beleaguered mindset of the UK commercial real estate market.”
Tim Wheeler, that name rings a bell – wasn’t he the lead singer of Ash? Anyway, anything you can [...]

“Evan, EVAN, could I just finish answering the question if that’s ok….”
Housing Minister Caroline Flint was on a hiding to nothing this morning as she tried to avoid questions about the Government’s housing policy and the likelihood of actually building 3m new homes by 2020.
She was, however, given a bit of a mauling by Evan [...]

The guv’nor and ‘is bird
We’re not talking Alanis Morrisette “rain on your wedding day” irony here, we’re talking actual, implying-the-opposite-of-what-is-the-case kind of irony - the kind that has you scratching your head like an evolutionary throwback while emitting a series of bewildered guttural croaks.
The cause of my confusion, bordering upon chagrin, stems from Guy Ritchie’s [...]