News

House prices in the UK went up 10.2% in the year to June, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said.
Excluding London and the south-east, UK house prices rose by 6.3%.
It says house price annual inflation was 10.7% in England – driven by a 19.3% rise in London (which is now cooling) – 3.5% in Wales, 6% in Scotland (Driven by Edinburgh and Aberdeen) and 4.9% in Northern Ireland.
The ONS also says that in June, prices paid by first-time buyers were 12% higher than in June the previous year, while home movers paid 9.5% more.
The ONS puts the average UK “mix-adjusted” house price at £265,000.
Broken down, these are an average of £276,000 in England, £167,000 in Wales, £137,000 in Northern Ireland and £193,000 in Scotland.
The average price in London was £499,000, compared with the north-east’s average of £150,000 – the lowest in England.
The ONS says that England is the only country in the UK where average property prices are now higher than the pre-financial crisis peak of January 2008. Scotland is still a slow recovering market.
However, the ONS statistics – drawn from mortgage data – are vastly at odds with what the Land Registry reported for June.
The Land Registry said that average house prices across England and Wales were still below the peak – which it put at November 2007.
The Land Registry reported average house prices as being £172,011 – a gap of some £90,000 compared with the ONS’s “mid-adjusted” UK average of £265,000.
The enormous difference in the two sets of official data prompt the question as to whether the Bank of England will be making its decisions on rate rises with the help of the ONS or the Land Registry.
Differences or not, clearly there would now appear to be light at the end of the tunnel, despite the difference in two Government Offices a useful guide to the health of the housing industry is repossessions. A total of 5,400 homes were repossessed in the second quarter of this year.
According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the figure represents 0.05% of all loans.
The figure is down from 6,400 repossessions in the first quarter of this year, and compares with 7,600 in the second quarter of last year.
In the first half of this year, altogether 11,800 homes were repossessed – the lowest since the second half of 2006.
The total figure of 5,400 includes 1,300 buy-to-let properties.
The CML also reports that the number of mortgages in arrears is at its lowest since the first quarter of 2008. There are 131,400 mortgages currently (as at end of June) in arrears of 2.5% or more. Perhaps getting back to “normal” is not so far away. I often marvel at how Government Ministers make decisions based on their own offices “facts”. The one I would be closer to believing is the Land Registry, although a little behind that is the property price registered when a home changes hands. The ONS takes into account mortgage applications many of which may fail after the statistic is reported for the month (perhaps they should take completions), they also “adjust” the figures proportionately based on the numbers in each price bracket, whereas the land registry take a true average of what was registered.
I hope the above helps you to understand that although we have a slow market it is improving. And although the BBC news reports the ONS which appears rosy, there is a gap between that and reality.
We have recently invested in a quadcopter with underslung camera so will be revisiting many of our properties to take aerial views of both the property and property’s views. This will be uploaded to our website as a video and the website is currently under construction to accommodate this. Obviously not appropriate for town houses, but anything with a bit of land around it and open views will clearly benefit from video over still photography.

Bill Reid BEM BA
DipPFS DipNAEA