The various data suggesting how house prices shifted over 2011 are mostly in and the vast array of pundits have made their predictions for the market in 2012. So here’s a round up of the prospects for the housing market in the year ahead and a suggestion of what it might all mean for house building. If we look at all the indicators, the picture painted for 2011 was of house prices flatlining. Some indicators were up a little, some down…
Hallelujah! The plight of trapped first-time house movers has finally got into the national headlines. Recent research undertaken by Lloyds Banking Group exposes the problem of increasing numbers of financially-constrained first-time homeowners trapped and unable to make the second step up the ladder.
On the face of it the Homes and Communities Agency statistics for affordable housing starts are absolutely awful. I’m going to go out on a limb and accept that they look significantly worse as a snapshot of what is going on than the reality on the ground. The data suggest that the starts are back-end loaded within the financial year, so a drop in this half of the year would have been expected. Obviously this drop was greatly exaggerated by…
There is no getting away from the fact that the latest UK jobs figures are depressing. There’ll be plenty of discussion about that in the general news. And it bodes ill for the economy overall and in turn for construction. But for those looking for gloom in the construction jobs figures, the data does not seem to support the view that employment levels are once again plunging. The quarterly workforce jobs figures were not updated this month. But the alternative Labour…
This is no ordinary recession. This is a serious depression, the end of which still looks to be at least a couple of years away and possibly a lot further. If that proves the case it would have lasted longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s, although the recession would not have been as quite as deep. The well respected economist and Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf recently wrote: “The UK is in the midst of what is set…
The latest official data seem to provide yet more evidence of the decline in construction output, although the picture may not be as bleak – yet – as the published figures suggest if taken at face value. You shouldn’t really read too much into one month’s figures anyway in an industry that can be highly volatile and that is going through a particularly volatile phase. But people will and I am obliged to do it for a living. That said…
The latest batch of housing market indicators show no real sign that the UK market overall is either collapsing through concerns over the economy and jobs or rising on lack of supply. The pattern continues of house prices gently sliding nationally. But as the latest report released today by the surveyors’ body RICS shows London remains, in the eyes of estate agents at least, a completely different market to the rest of the UK. In London a positive balance of 25%…
Be prepared for a slower recovery than we were expecting – that’s that message from the first of autumn construction forecasts to emerge. Leading Edge had already penned in a double-dip recession for construction when it last produced a forecast in March, but now it expects the fall to be deeper and the recovery to be slower.
There are times when you hope you’re misreading data or that there may be an error. But it doesn’t look as though these crutches are available as I stare at the carnage implicit in the new orders data. The index, which represents a seasonally-adjusted price-adjusted measure of orders taken by contractors for new work has hit a record low. It stands at 57.5 for the second quarter of this year. Five years ago it stood at almost double that. (see…
The latest pan-industry trade survey compiled by the Construction Products Association economics team paints a perhaps predictably gloomy picture of the state of the industry in the second quarter of this year. The survey suggests that the upswing it recorded in output from contractors in the first quarter was short-lived. The balance of firms doing more work and those do less is was put at -37%. That’s the worst figures for a year and a half. The more detailed figures…