Asking prices for properties new to the market have barely crept up in the last month, Rightmove said this morning.
The change has been just 0.1% across the country, with a drop of 0.5% in London asking prices.
The average asking price is now £272,275 – still heavily driven by London’s average asking price of £589,776, although this is down from last month’s £592,763.
New instructions are up 20% on the previous month and 9.6% on a year ago and, says Rightmove, are early signs of a “belated return to balance between supply and demand”.
It pointedly said that the Bank of England would be relieved at signs of the market cooling.
The Bank has been told by Chancellor George Osborne to step in if necessary to stop the market getting out of control, and been handed new powers to cap the size of mortgages in relation to earnings.
Rightmove also hit out at the “clumsy” implementation of the Mortgage Market Review, causing a drop in mortgage approvals and leading to “headache and heartache”.
While the increase in new listings is heavily concentrated in the north and Wales, with annual increases in new stock of 19.2% and 15.3% respectively, new instructions across Greater London have gone up 12.3%.
Supply still looks very short across the south-west, East Anglia and the south-east, where new instructions are up 6.7%, 6.6% and 5.9%.
Miles Shipside, Rightmove director and housing market analyst, said: “The London market powers the rest of the UK but is starting to run out of steam.
“While the legacy of rises in central London continues to ripple out to its better-value commuter-belt, fuelling price increases in all southern regions, London itself is now marking time.
“It’s an example to the rest of the country of what happens when affordability and common sense get stretched too far.”
He added that the “chatter on the street” is that quality buyers have become thin on the ground.
According to Rightmove, the average agent now has 64 properties on its books – down from 71 a year ago but up from last month’s 62.
As I and a number of others said in posts a few weeks back, the market is well and truly on the turn. "Levelling out, correction, cooling or a more balanced market…." I'm not sure I agree with the descriptions but change is certainly afoot as the pre-curser to the imminent and inevitable rise in interest rates. This is nothing new and any decent agent will have the ability to "roll with the punches" and adapt to their changing market place. In regards to increases instruction numbers, whilst I cant say that I have seen the same level of increases state by RM, they are certainly moving in the right direction.
As an aside and on the subject of RM, I met with my both RM and Zoopla BDM's last week. Zoopla had "re-evaluated their scales" resulting in a saving of £350 pcm to my business. RM were willing to offer exactly…ZERO!
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Interesting story. No doubt whilst the housing market stalls (and Z too by the sounds of it), RM will continue with their upward-only price reviews.
As for "the average agent now has 64 properties on its books", quite – and it's very unfair that their monthly RM costs are in effect being subsidised by the many smaller agents across the country; agents that may well only have 5 to 10 properties on their books.
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