During a conversation with a colleague on the recent spate of cash calls by house builders I was quizzed on how much damage the recession had done to their balance sheets. I made a stab (a lucky guess as it turned out), but I should have had a number at my figure tips. I waffled while I grabbed a calculator and tapped in some very rough and ready numbers. Well have a guess how much that bit of number crunching…
The fall in GDP wasn’t as big as we thought thanks to stronger than estimated construction activity. That is the assessment of the statisticians who put together the national accounts. But is this good news or bad news for construction?
Feel that fantasy football is a bit old hat? Think you have outgrown FIFA Manager 09 and are itching to run something bigger than a football club? Well why not try playing Fantasy Chancellor and conduct your very own Spending Review 2010.
The latest employment figures make grim reading for the construction industry with the number of workforce jobs plunging by 61,000 in the second quarter of this year. This means that 111,000 jobs have been lost to the industry since they peaked in the autumn last year.
I am not sure about you, but I sometimes have to go to the back numbers to make sense of the statistics that get thrown at me. I have been for some months a bit curious as to why the brightest brains (well some seriously well paid experts) among the UK economists have consistently been wrong in their prediction of inflation, each time overstating the fall in the headline figure. Again this month, they expected the Consumer Price Index to…
The big news is that for the first time in two years more surveyors in Britain said prices rose than said they fell, according to the latest RICS housing market survey. The big question is whether this is the start of a continuous and sustained recovery in the housing market or just, as the ITEM Club suggested yesterday, a false dawn. The big problem is that while the survey points to a general rise in prices, it also highlights that…
Today the Item Club released a special report on house prices that suggests a further fall in the first half of next year. It sees the recent rise as a false dawn and says it will be another five years before prices get close to the peak they reached in 2007. Like many others the ITEM Club suggests that the current buoyancy is down to a shortage of stock on the market and that unemployment rising will put downward pressure…
House price falls are over. That is the declaration made over the past two months by the futures market after two years of grim expectations. As recently as last December you could forward buy a notional average house three years hence for £106,153 on the futures market. That price is set against the non-seasonally adjusted Halifax index, which peaked at £201,081 August 2007. Basically the futures market was predicting that house prices would drop by half from peak. The market’s…
The new orders figures were out today and they hint at a uplift, with the headline figure showing a 2% rise comparing the three months to July with the previous three months. And recently when I speak to people in the industry they seem a bit more optimistic. Sadly any support to the new orders figures (other the effects of restocking among private housebuilders) is down to the public purse. A friend in need at the moment, but I suspect…
The latest figures from Halifax put the price of an average house (not seasonally adjusted) up by 3% on the low they reached in March this year and broadly on a par with the level at the end of last year. This will no doubt help keep alive the hopes that many have that the worst of the house price falls are over and it will probably stir many to speculate that house prices are on the march back upward….