House Price Spy Blog

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The property news for September is that the bubble is still going strong, prices keep rising and confidence is rising once more. As mentioned its the fastest rise. in 5 years.

For house builders however the news is not quite so good, most builders have recorded losses for the last period with Bevis posting a £8.6 million pre-tax loss for the first half of this year. With the demand for housing focussed on reliable housing in established areas new housing has not looked the good investment it once was.

Other news is that holiday homes in the UK are reaching the highest sale prices for many years with many opting for cheaper holidays nearer to home, with flights being more expensive and the Euro and Dollar rising prohibitively overseas holidays are seen as expensive. Overseas property developers are even more heavily hit than the UK. this is seen as a major factor in the recovery of average UK prices.

So as always there is good news and bad news, but overall the picture looks better than at the start of the year. Even US house prices have started to rise, with slow but significant rises across the board!

You may have noticed that we have added another feature to the free property information at House Price Spy: Estate agents listings at Town level for every every area covered by the site! Ready to take your property dealing to the next level? Then here is the place to find the perfect company for the job!

There are thousands of estate agent listings with address and contact details for each one letting you get in touch!! You can evern search them by area, postcode or town!!

We hope to be adding loads more features in the months to come while keeping the good things from House Price Spy that have attracted many thousands of loyal members. Check out our estate agents listings now!!

The latest house price figures are slightly misleading and confusing, prices in England have risen faster than at any time in the previous five years! But as mentioned this is based on a record low in sale numbers and this could fluctuate wildly, will we see the press fall on these variations as another recession?

I think that we can see that there has been a little recovery of seller confidence, when this rises further we will see a reliable rise in prices, the more property on the market the more it becomes a buyers market and prices are sure to fall.

External financial factors such as unemployment and stallled pay rises are all more important to the stability of the country that rising house prices. Lending to small businesses and mortgages are down significantly meaning there are still people being sceptical about the quick recovery the UK is experiencing.

The deals sections have no been updated with new offers!!! There are hundreds of pounds of worth of savings and deals plus free gifts and tasty stuff!! Its worth seeing waht is new and if you could save!

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Property prices keep on rising but financial experts are reminding everyone that this is based on record low numbers of sales rather than high demand. The number of properties going on the market is falling to its lowest for years and the figures on rising sale price are based on the demand for this small number of properties.

In addition, I will remind you that the summer is the traditional sale season and after that peak is over we may even see some sort of fall in the low number of sales. With number of sales (17,000 for england and 2,500 for scotland, just 865 for Wales) down to a third of their previous value the average sold price will fluctuate wildly as the market varies. To get a reliable figure we need more sales, which is were the government come in, low interest rates are fine to try to promote spending but anyone paying a tiny mortgage is hardly going to move home when their new mortgage will be 5-10x as large. Many people are staying put while the low interest rates last, and saving the money for a later day. Many are predicting that a rise in interest rates could see a boom in property sales some time early in 2010.

The government need to get the market back on track, there are still plenty of new houses being built and this could be the way to get the market working plus the LIFT scheme and others.

Negative equity is back with over 3.5 million people unable to move home due to falling house prices, high bank charges on fixed rate mortgages and the fall in the number of mortgages granted in 2009. A further 2 million people have less than 10% equity in their property, meaning that 1 in 10 of the UK population is stuck where they are for the moment!!

With figures like that its no wonder the property sector is finding life so hard, unemployment and repossesions adding to the woes of the public.

Unemployment has reached 2.44 millions up 220,000 which is a 14 year high! The brittle recovery in the property market will be reliant on public confidence and higher mortgage lending.

There are some really promising signs of sustained ‘growth’ in the UK property market with the smart money now being on a relative recovery during 2009, figures from the Halifax show that there has been an 8% rise in property values since February and a 3.3% rise in the last 3 months alone.

This is based on a total fall of around 20% since the problems started in 2008. Just to crash this party, many analysts are predicting a fall after the rise. But this could be explained by the busy summer period being over. With more money in the finance industry, more consumer confidence and hopefully a few lessons being learned in the industry!

There is certainly a bit of a feel good factor coming back to property sales, property related services and even unrelated financial services.

Lenders have been heavily criticised for capitalising on the troubles in mortgage lending and the industry in general to profit from already hard up cusomers. Below are just a few of the ways we have been short changed by lenders:

Most borrowers are paying £1000 more than they would usually be, fixed/capped rate mortgages especially!!

Lenders have been charging £100 per session for debt counselling!

Lenders have been too quick off the mark in repossesions.

The whole Payment Protection Insurance cash in.

Bank charges have risen as banks try to claw back their profits.