What year to compare house prices to?

Ditto

I'm looking to buy a house soon.
I check nethouseprices to see how much houses have sold for in the past and was wondering when was the peak of the market, and what year should I be looking at now to compare present prices?

Thanks

princeofpounds

You need to pick an index.

Ignore rightmove, that's just asking prices (very different to transaction prices!)

Halifax and nationwide are reasonably timely (they indicate mortgaged rather than completed prices) but I don't know if they have regional breakdowns.

The most accurate is the land registry but this has a serious timelag.

http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/graphs-index.php

has lots of data on a national level, which would point to mid-2006 selling prices roughly.

pie81

personally I don't think we can tell you what year to compare with as we don't know your local area property market. Different areas have dropped and risen different amounts. Better to compare asking prices with current asking prices for other properties in your area.

Doozergirl

I agree with pie81, different areas have been affected differently and they also rose differently - during 2006 London prices rocketed with people tripping over themselves to buy, whilst other areas barely moved in price.

I wouldn't use previous prices as a reference at all except that the peak must have been around Spring 2007 so I wouldn't want to pay more for a house than was paid for it then

Doozergirl

You're a live wire, aren't you!

pie did say we don't know your local area property market, not that we don't know where you are.

pie81

sorry, don't know that area I'm afraid. But I would guess your local estate agents will... hence current local asking prices are the best guide

pie81

the problem is that there is no blanket rule for how much properties have dropped by. there are variations not only from area to area but even from street to street and house to house. in general the "preferred" areas and the "best" houses will have dropped less (but this is a generalisation - may not be true if they rocketed upwards too fast in the boom). so we just can't say "prices are at 2006 levels".

there is no easy answer I'm afraid!! you need to look around at what else is for sale/recently sold on EA's websites, and work out whether the property you're interested in buying/selling is better or worse than those... of course that doesn't tell you sold prices just asking prices, but I think the way the market has been recently you can assume that attractive properties would sell for maybe 5% under asking, unattractive for maybe 15% under asking (but that is a total guess).

brit1234

Ditto wrote: »

I'm looking to buy a house soon.
I check nethouseprices to see how much houses have sold for in the past and was wondering when was the peak of the market, and what year should I be looking at now to compare present prices?

Thanks

Its been widely reported that prices went down to 2003-2004 levels. So you don't want to pay higher than 2004 against the landregistry figures.

When people talk about 2006, ignore them, prices on all the indicies are below that. However still over valued and set to start fallling again shortly.

Doozergirl

Ditto wrote: »

Why do you think I was taking the pi$$, I wasn't...

I gave the area I was looking at, L13, and I copied my details in as well. I thought someone might know the local property market. Sorry you took it the wrong way as it was not intended as a pi$$ take. As you can see as well I thanked everyone who responded to the question.
Some people are a bit sensitive....:rolleyes:

My apologies; I thought the fact that you'd copied and pasted your user details into the post was pointing out that we should already know where you live.

I wouldn't take any notice of someone that says you can draw a level with another moment in time; especially someone who isn't even interested in buying a house right now. You simply can't draw a level because of all the variations. If you want to buy a house now, compare what is going on now and hope to pay less than the current going rate.

If you don't know what the going rate is, you haven't researched enough, so keep going...

Cannon_Fodder

As stated, within your area there will be low and high spots, but the following may help as a starting point;


[IMG]http://www1.landregistry.gov.uk/houseprices/housepriceindex/report/default.asp?g=1&gt=1&a=Liverpool&ac=Merseyside&s=01 January 2002&e=01 July 2009&t=4[/IMG]

soulsaver

Nethousprices is ok based on the land registry results but has recently had a lot of errors in it in our area: duplicated registrations and miscounts, which can undermine your confidence in the figures.
Of course it may just reflect bad data input from the land registry. Land registry figures ignore auction results, reposession sales and improvements (extensions, up grades, new kitchen, new bathrooms etc) - so even the 'most accurate index' is flawed to some extent.
However as a broad brush can still be useful. Find similar props in the same area to the one in which you're interested, in the NHP data and compare them with the historical prices achieved... and you should see the peak. When you get to the street level data you can sort them by address which will bring the same house being sold 2 or 3 times in the last 9 or so years together.
I'll guess mid 2007 peak. And recent results will give you an indicator to what is being achieved against prior years. You can then extrapolate an approximate benchmark.
BTW I don't know L13, but if it's an area that has a high proportion of repos, you'd really need to be mindful of the possible impact of the excluded data. Good Luck