It’s a buyers’ market in Britain as house sellers drop their asking price
While the interest rate cut by the Bank of England on August 4 might help new buyers to get a foot on the property ladder, it was unlikely to stoke a house price boom, property website Rightmove said in its monthly survey.
The survey, conducted between July 10 and August 6, showed the average asking price for a property fell to €287,497, a rise of 2.1% compared with a year ago, but a decline of 0.2% from June-July.
In June-July, house price inflation was just 0.2%, the lowest annual rate in 10 years, while prices fell 1.0% from the previous survey, Rightmove said.
Surveys by major British mortgage lenders Nationwide and Halifax have also shown house price inflation at multi-year lows.
Rightmove said the average number of properties for sale on estate agents’ books increased to 72 in August from 71 in July and properties were also taking longer to sell: 78 days in August from 75 days in July.
But figures released by the British government last week that showed a slight improvement in the number of completed transactions in the second quarter compared with the first three months of this year indicated the market had troughed.
“Numbers of sales are slowly starting to recover, but we still face the prospect that 2005 will be the toughest housing market since we came out of the mid-1990s doldrums,” said Miles Shipside, a director of Rightmove.
The Rightmove survey was published just days after British property services firm Countrywide reported a slump in profits due to the slower housing market and said that despite signs the market was stabilising, risks remained.
“Public confidence in the housing markets, while improved from the nadir of last autumn, could easily be knocked off course,” said Countrywide chairman Christopher Sporborg in a statement.
