House prices: Where are Britain’s biggest bargains?
Last week I profiled the role of the RSN in developing a new toolkit on rural housing. The fluctuations of the housing market are bizarre and counter-intuitive and I think need a far more robust approach at the national level that the current piecemeal (some of which is very good) response to one of the biggest challenges facing the sustainability of rural (and for that matter all) places. This article demonstrates just how weird the situation is. It tells us, in a situation with chronic demand and undersupply that house prices in some places are falling – some of which have a rural component (particularly former mining communities in the north):
Discounting is rife in the UK housing market as dampened demand forced vendors to slash their asking prices in November.
More than a third of all properties currently on sale in Britain have had their asking price lowered at least once since coming to the market.
This figure is up from 27pc in early 2014 and the highest proportion of discounting since August 2012.
The average price reduction has also grown since the start of the year, with asking price reductions now at 6.7pc on average off the initial asking price (equivalent to £24,429), up from 6.3pc (£20,781) in February 2014.
A total of £3.8bn has been knocked off the original asking prices of properties currently on the market, the property portal Zoopla found.
However, the stamp duty reforms introduced by George Osborne at the beginning of December may give the market a boost, analysts at the website said.
Preston has the highest proportion of price reductions in the country, with over four in ten properties having had their asking price lowered since first coming to the market.
This is closely followed by the Yorkshire towns and cities of Barnsley, Wakefield and Rotherham.
However it is not just in the north of England where sellers are resetting their expectations.
The largest discounts currently are to be found in affluent Mitcham in south-west London where sellers have dropped prices by 9.2pc on average, equal to £55,606.