Brickonomics

I’ve just received an email from James Hastings, head of construction futures at Experian Business Strategies with the latest forecast update attached. And, not a surprise, it was gloomier than the summer forecast, which then saw the industry overall stumbling rather than plunging into recession this year and next. It is the most optimistic of the main surveys in the sector released over the past month. The figures from Experian suggest that if you take housing work out of the…

Read More Read More

If you take an optimistic view of life you may find some comfort in the latest housing market survey from the surveyors’ body RICS. For pessimists there remains plenty of scope for concern.

Normality is finally being rewritten – the world is waking up to the fact that the past decade or so was extraordinary and bred extraordinary folly. Accompanying this awakening I hear the phrase “no one could have seen this coming” so often of late. I may have used the phrase myself. So, I thought it might be fun to point to two foreseers in particular (not including Warren Buffett) that have gained a near cult following having been proved in…

Read More Read More

The futures market has unsurprisingly taken an even darker view of house prices over the past month as the Tradition Future HPI latest figures show. The market now puts the peak to trough fall in the average house price at 38% (as measured on the Halifax non-seasonally adjusted index). And this is expected over a four year period.

My good friend Martin Hewes passed me a copy of the latest forecast from Hewes & Associates. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. His last forecast was pretty bleak, this is bleaker still. The headline figure of note is the 11.3% drop in new work next year. With a slightly more muted 7.6% drop in RMI work, the figures suggest an overall drop in construction output of 9.7% in 2009. And that comes after the industry falls into recession this…

Read More Read More

Another month, another fall in the Halifax house price index. And we can expect that to continue for some while yet, despite the cash transfusion pumped into the financial system and the monetary defibrillation provided by a concert of central banks cutting interest rates. The patient is ill and recovery will take some time. The good news is that we may have avoided the need to read the last rights. So what does the latest Halifax survey tell us and…

Read More Read More

One question has been twitching at the back of my brain for some weeks now. It is this: If the Government is prepared to invest “whatever it takes” to get the wheels of the “unreal” economy that is banking back on the rails, then will it be prepared to invest “whatever it takes” to keep the wheels on the real economy?

If one thing epitomised the boom years in the housing market it was the building of high-density blocks of apartments that were sucked up off plan by eager investors. The credit crunch has changed all that. Outside of London dense schemes of flats are rapidly going out of fashion. Having been for many years gradually squeezed out of house builders’ product mix by flats, houses are making a comeback (well proportionately anyway). And there are many people predicting that the…

Read More Read More

The RICS construction survey provides a valuable early indicator of workload trends, so its latest figures showing the slump widening out from house building is cause for concern. You don’t see too many charts showing sentiment collapse as fast as it appears to have looking at the charts produced by the RICS in its construction survey. Sliced by sector or regionally the charts look much the same. From bubbling along nicely a year ago when the majority were looking at…

Read More Read More

The surveyors’ body RICS seems pretty convinced that annual rate of house building in England will fall below 100,000, unless of course something dramatic happens to pick the market up – what who knows? This had me wondering just how low this puts the house building industry compared to periods in the past. Are we about to hit an all-time low for house building?