Possibly falling in the South, but not the North. Here in the midlands, we just managed to get a house below asking price, but it does need some work done on it.
When I spoke to an Oxford agent recently, he seemed to think things were still strong at the low end of the market (ie, things I aspire to being able to afford) but increasingly sluggish or even falling the more expensive one went.
Obviously I should start looking to buy a six-bedroom mansion.
The thing I'm complaining about really is that the BBC have on consecutive days posted articles saying "prices rising" and "prices falling" without apparently feeling that it's worth making any kind of comment on the different answers you get if you ask the question in different ways; the left and and the right hand apparently unaware of each other's existence.
Another problem is that they don't define what a "fall" report from an individual surveyor means: a fall in the mean prices of the houses they've seen, a fall in the maximum price anything was sold at, more houses selling for less than they think they'd have got a month ago than more, or what. Each of these could give quite different answers, and the latter two at least could very easily be consistent with mean prices across the country continuing to rise. (Is the reporting even consistent across surveyors? I don't feel like paying L120/year to get the full report, though...)
Stepping back a bit, what I suspect is going on is that different price bands are experiencing very different levels of inflation, leading to the different ways of measuring things producing such different answers (ISTR a relatively recent report that in the US, the most expensive houses were falling in price independently of the rest of the market, though obviously that's going to have an effect on the lower bands sooner or later).
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Date: 2003-07-22 04:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-22 04:48 am (UTC)Obviously I should start looking to buy a six-bedroom mansion.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-22 04:48 am (UTC)The thing I'm complaining about really is that the BBC have on consecutive days posted articles saying "prices rising" and "prices falling" without apparently feeling that it's worth making any kind of comment on the different answers you get if you ask the question in different ways; the left and and the right hand apparently unaware of each other's existence.
Another problem is that they don't define what a "fall" report from an individual surveyor means: a fall in the mean prices of the houses they've seen, a fall in the maximum price anything was sold at, more houses selling for less than they think they'd have got a month ago than more, or what. Each of these could give quite different answers, and the latter two at least could very easily be consistent with mean prices across the country continuing to rise. (Is the reporting even consistent across surveyors? I don't feel like paying L120/year to get the full report, though...)
Stepping back a bit, what I suspect is going on is that different price bands are experiencing very different levels of inflation, leading to the different ways of measuring things producing such different answers (ISTR a relatively recent report that in the US, the most expensive houses were falling in price independently of the rest of the market, though obviously that's going to have an effect on the lower bands sooner or later).