The latest survey by the surveyors’ body RICS appears to add as much uncertainty as it does clarity over which way and how fast the housing market is shifting. The headline figures suggest that house prices fell in January, but at a slower rate that in December. Is this good news or bad news?
If the City traders in residential derivatives have their fingers on the pulse of how house prices are likely to move then by 2016 the average home will be worth less than today. The index Future HPI, put together by Peter Sceats & Associates, provides an index of residential derivatives trades and it puts the average price of a house in December 2016 measured against the Halifax index at £159,076. That’s £2,394 less than the average non-seasonally adjusted house price…
Construction workload is falling and we should expect it to fall further. That basically is what the latest survey from the surveyors’ body RICS suggests. The lines on the graph 1 are pretty clear. There are firms doing more work (blue line), but there are more firms doing less (red line). And on balance there is a majority of firms of the view that workloads will fall over the next 12 months (green line). But given that this survey data…
There has been some rather unsettling data released over recent days for those who fear falling house prices. The latest Bank of England data showed seasonally adjusted mortgage lending falling by 10% in December to a level not seen since May 2009 when the housing market slumped. Nationwide’s house price index showed a further slight fall of 0.1% in January, which when other indicies are considered suggest prices are on a downward path. Meanwhile there are worrying signs of falling…
Taking the latest monthly construction survey from the buyers’ body CIPS at face value we could be tempted into thinking all is looking well set for the year. The overall index bounced sharply back from 49.1 to 53.7 – that means from below the 50 no change mark to a figure that suggests reasonably sound growth. And, says the survey release, there was not just a boost to work done but a rise in new business. More encouragingly optimism among…
The figure for construction output within the latest “shock” GDP preliminary estimate figures showed construction output for the UK down 3.3% in the final quarter compared with the previous quarter. The release also estimated that the snow effect on construction alone caused a drop in quarterly GDP of 0.1%. Well did construction output fall by 3.3%?
With all the fuss about inflation and the impact that it is having on families, I thought I might just take a look at what its impact might be on construction folk. So here are some very crude figures taken from the average weekly earnings non-seasonally adjusted data including bonuses and arrears. Average weekly earnings in construction have dropped 1.1% between November 2007 and November 2010 according to the latest official figures.
Both buyers and sellers appeared to be fleeing the housing market in December, according to the latest housing market survey from the surveyors’ body RICS. The intriguing question is whether this was a freak result cause by heavy falls of snow or are we seeing a climate change in the housing market. Certainly the RICS points understandably to the bad weather as a factor in the results. But we will have to wait for later results to provide a firmer…
Construction output is beginning finally to show signs that it is falling into a much-expected second dip into recession after the stimulus-propelled growth earlier this year. The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that on a moving three-month basis the industry contracted by 1.5% in volume terms in November. The graph (right) shows the moving three-month total for output, with simple straight line estimates for monthly movements in the totals made for the pre-2010 data, which was…
The latest Experian forecast on the face of it paints a picture of a rockier road for construction over the coming few years compared with its previous forecast. But on balance it is a slightly more optimistic picture of the path ahead for construction than is suggested by other forecast released recently. The impact of the economic stimulus on construction was perhaps stronger and more immediate than many might have expected and hence the withdrawal of the stimulus and the…