Rightmove report a cooling down of the housing market in June!
The UK's property internet giant has reported that house price growth has slowed across Britain in June, dropping in London and in the North of the country, as more sellers have entered the market eager to prosper from the recent boom.
The price of new houses put onto the market in June was almost unchanged, rising just £272 or 0.1% from May, according to Rightmove’s latest House Price Index. Last month the index rose 3.6%.
Has there been any other contributing factors to this report of a slowdown than just an expansion in supply? The opinion is that through luck or judgement it appears that the timing of the government's Mortgage Market Review, which has allowed mortgage lenders from April of this year to apply more stringent lending criteria on would be home buyers, has resulted in a fall in the number of mortgage approvals since spring and as a consequence the number of buyers able to enter the market. In conjunction with this, it has been suggested there has been a natural tail-off in the pent-up buyer demand that built up from the recessionary period, which has also assisted in alleviating some of the upwards price pressure in the housing market.
In May and June our offices continued to post strong sales results, reported firm house prices, with shortages in certain styles of home in some areas of Lincoln and the country, continuing to put some upward pressure on pricing.
With the Governor of the Bank of England using his Mansion House speech to suggest that interest rates many now start a slow and graduated increase before the end of the year, some pundits consider that the housing market is now on the verge of entering another interesting phase of its post recessionary development, the potential impact of which is still rather uncertain.
