House prices in a quarter of the UK’s largest cities are still struggling to recover to the level they were at just before the worst of the financial crisis struck.
Ten years ago, in September 2008, investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed – a global event which followed the run on Northern Rock the previous year, when it became the first British bank to fail for 150 years.
In July 2008, average house prices had fallen hard – but ten years later, they have been measured as remaining lower still in Liverpool, Aberdeen and Belfast.
In Newcastle and Edinburgh, there has been weak single-digit growth.
By contrast, house prices in Cambridge and London are more than 65% up on ten years ago.
At £129,629, prices in Belfast are 28% lower than they were a decade ago, highlighting how hard Northern Ireland’s capital was affected.
Aberdeen and Liverpool are also still recovering, with prices down 3% and 1% respectively on where they were a decade ago. In Aberdeen, house prices have dwindled as the oil industry has shrunk.
House prices are just 1% higher than a decade ago in Glasgow (£121,940) and 3% up in Newcastle (£128,641), an indication of how slow their recovery has been.
By contrast, home owners in Cambridge have seen the value of their properties rocket by 70%, on average, to £432,410.
London home owners have experienced nearly as spectacular a rise, with prices up 65% to an average of £483,792 since July 2008.
Prices have also risen sharply in Bristol and Oxford, by 53% and 55% respectively.
On a national basis, house prices are 26% above the level they were ten years ago, highlighting the regional differences within the UK’s housing market.
Richcard Donnell, director at Hometrack which released the data this morning, said: “While 2008 was the year when house prices fell at their fastest rate, they continued to fall for a further three to four years.”
| City | Average price | %yoy Jul-18 |
% change from Jul-08 |
| Nottingham | £152,000 | 7.5% | 27% |
| Leicester | £173,000 | 6.6% | 28% |
| Liverpool | £117,800 | 6.3% | -1% |
| Manchester | £165,600 | 6.1% | 23% |
| Birmingham | £160,100 | 5.7% | 24% |
| Leeds | £164,700 | 5.7% | 15% |
| Edinburgh | £229,900 | 5.6% | 14% |
| Bournemouth | £292,000 | 5.4% | 34% |
| Cardiff | £205,000 | 5.1% | 26% |
| Sheffield | £135,900 | 4.9% | 11% |
| Glasgow | £122,000 | 4.6% | 1% |
| Portsmouth | £239,100 | 3.5% | 36% |
| Belfast | £129,700 | 3.2% | -28% |
| Bristol | £280,200 | 3.1% | 53% |
| Newcastle | £128,700 | 2.7% | 3% |
| Southampton | £228,000 | 2.0% | 32% |
| Cambridge | £432,500 | 1.2% | 70% |
| Oxford | £411,900 | 0.5% | 55% |
| London | £483,800 | -0.1% | 65% |
| Aberdeen | £163,200 | -4.0% | -3% |
| 20 city index | £252,400 | 4.2% | 40% |
| UK | £215,700 | 3.7% | 26% |
These figures give the lie to those who constantly parrot that there is a Housing Crisis. There’s no general ‘Housing Crisis’, there is a London and S E England Housing Crisis. And instead of just building more and more houses in a vain attempt to ‘satisfy demand’, the government should switch much of its investment away from S E England, build more infrastructure in the north and provide incentives for business to move up there. I know we had ‘The Northern Powerhouse’ but we need more than cool slogans.
People talk about the problems of immigration from abroad, but there is also the ‘immigration’ of many young people from other parts of the UK, who are forced to leave their communities and move to London and the South East for work. When they arrive they can’t afford to rent or buy because of the massive difference in housing costs, caused by disproportionate investment here and so the cycle goes on.
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