Market Comment 15th Feb 2010 PDF Print E-mail
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Written by TrigoldCrystal Marketing Manager   
Friday, 19 February 2010 00:00
“House prices jump 3.2 per cent in four weeks”
The average cost of a home has climbed 6.1 per cent over the past year, according to Rightmove.co.uk

“Property drifts towards years of no growth”
As house prices in Britain are poised for a double dip, we look at whether the time is ripe for remortgaging

The headlines above from The Times are pretty much what we are used to by now. Plenty of doom and gloom and the occasional piece that says: “signs of recovery”. Certainly predictions are impossible when we are faced with so many opposing views. And add to that the fact that political messages over the state of the economy are likely to polarize over the next few months with the election looming and predicting the future state of the economy by reading the popular media will only get harder. As you know, TrigoldCrystal have a partnership with Hometrack, the housing intelligence specialists. The most recent Hometrack House Price Survey shows some very interesting statistics on the market. For instance, house price rises in January were restricted to only 7% of postcode areas and these areas are the ones where the average house prices is 35% higher the national figure. In addition they are all in London, the South East and South West. The point here is that under the headline statistics there is always more complex picture and this is much better at giving us an idea of what challenges and opportunities we face.

These figures are vital if we are to look at how we can restore confidence in the market and ease the flow of credit. We need much more movement in the housing market (which does not necessarily mean increasing prices) to help us in the mortgage industry and the wider economy too. In order to do this we need greater availability of credit to enable new a higher rate of transactions. Some lenders rely on very broad measures such as LTVs to throttle lending but by analyzing particular sectors of the market rather than the market in general lenders could be much cleverer at controlling risk and boosting transactions.

This is a relatively simple concept yet institutional focus seems much more about regulation rather than support for positive measures to get the market moving. Is that because everyone is too focused on the headlines?
Last Updated on Monday, 12 April 2010 09:36