Landlord Insurance Rent Guarantee | UK house price data send mixed messages
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UK homeowners could be forgiven for feeling completely confused about house prices. According to some indices, the boom is back. Others show a slump that staggers on.
House prices are some of the most closely watched data in the country but there has been a remarkable divergence between the various indices since 2009. All are published by credible providers; nonetheless they present wildly contrasting pictures of the health of the housing market.
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Prices are now 18 per cent below their 2007 peak, according to the latest figures from Halifax, released on Friday. According to other indices, however, they are back at the levels they reached nearly six years ago.Landlord Insurance Rent Guarantee
“You could get a completely different impression of the market, depending on what day you looked at the most recent data,†said Peter Williams, director of Cambridge university’s Centre for Housing and Planning Research. “If they are sending out confused messages then you end up with confused consumers.â€
Whether prices are rising or falling does not matter only to nervous homeowners; house price indices are also used by mortgage lenders to value their loan books, and by macroeconomic policy makers. The wrong signals can cause big problems.
The five most-used indicators marked similar trends during the housing boom, as prices soared, and stayed in tune as the market collapsed up to the spring of 2009. Since then, however, there has been wide divergence.
Experts believe this is because of changes in the market since the credit crunch. “The mix of properties being sold has changed [since 2007], from a market dominated by flats to a market dominated by detached houses, and London now bears too great an influence in some indices,†Mr Williams said.
Richard Donnell, research director at Hometrack, a housing data company, said: “The main indices’ divergence in recent years has a lot to do with low transaction volumes, a shift in where [they] are taking place and the type of property changing hands – which mean volatility has increased.â€
The mix of properties being sold has changed [since 2007], from a market dominated by flats to a market dominated by detached houses, and London now bears too great an influence in some indices Landlord Insurance Rent Guarantee
– Peter Williams, director of the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research
Index compilers admit they may not have adapted their calculations to reflect this. “If the mix of properties being sold is changing significantly then the overall average will be affected if we’re not reflecting that,†said David Thorpe of Acadametrics, a house price index provider.
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The indices that show prices are high at the moment, do so because they are reflecting the change in the value of the total housing stock. The low indices, on the other hand, show an average of the individual changes in house prices.
The first give much more weight to London and are useful, for example, in thinking about how much more wealthy some homeowners in Britain have become, with possible knock-on effects on consumer spending. The other readings reflect the reduction in prices that many households have experienced.
These differences are a function of the difficulty of aggregating lots of information in one index.
While comparing the indices can be confusing, tracking the changes in one index over time can be a more useful way of examining how the housing market is changing, Mr Williams said.
However, because the fall in the number of house sales has made the indices more changeable, experts advise caution in interpreting short-term changes.
To try to tackle the problem of mixed messages on house prices, the Office for National Statistics is working on improvements to its own index. When these are implemented, it will become an official national statistic, which should provide a more robust measure of price movements around the country.
In particular, the ONS is trying to improve the data on cash transactions, which have made up an increasing proportion of sales in recent years as buyers have found it harder to get mortgages.
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