Halifax Hpi November 2010 -0.1%

Dan:_4

neas wrote: »

Its a fall that if continued would take 10 years to make your houses 15% less than it is now. IN that time i'll be almost mortgage free.

neas, im glad to see your finally enjoying the joys of home ownership.

Good for you mate.

geneer

Gosh. were the usual suspects compelled to make light of a nominal 0.1% fall. What a shocker.

However, I can only imagine that any kind of a fall must be quite dissapointing to someone who might have been hoping for a continuation of octobers "bounce back" following septembers comedy nose dive.

I'm sure there's no posters like that here of course...:D

Percy1983

Dirk_Rambo wrote: »

wot you mean like big repare bills and negative equiity like

Sounds loverly to me.

Repair bill and maybe NE vs Stable home for my future family with no threat of a landlord kicking me out.

I will take home ownership please bob.

shortchanged_2

Generali wrote: »

At present there is very little competition in mortgage markets (banks don't seem to want to lend nor people borrow plus there are fewer banks than there were) and rates are generally low.

As a result, the difference between what banks borrow and lend at (the margin or spread) is pretty high historically.

Most likely, interest rates will only start to rise as the economy recovers. In that case, banks will start to compete a bit more for business and perhaps more lenders will enter the market too.

In that case, banks will look to cut their margins in order to attract business. My guess would be that an increase in base rates to 5% would increase mortgage rates by perhaps 4-4.5%.

Thing is though Generali will the banks be fearful of Base rates being so low again, never offer deals as good as many currently on SVR's and trackers that were taken out a couple of years ago?

I have a feeling we may well have seen the end of trackers and SVR's that offer 0.3 - 1% above base rate.

Rov

Quick point about margins, whilst I agree that if everything is completely rosey when interest rates creep up (in 5 years or so) and in that situation the banks are expecting house prices to rise then I agree margins will fall as competition returns.
However that's not the only situation where interest rates might rise.

There's the possibility of bond markets forcing up interest rates, in this case the banks would be expecting this to negatively impact house prices and margins wont decrease one bit.

There's also the possibility (however slim) that the BoE will increase base rate to stem inflation before the banks are confident that house prices have bottomed out, again they wont decrease margins.

It matters not a jot what you or I think is happening to prices, they could be stagnating, falling or rising in our minds, the margins are set by the banks and what they think will happen in the future, if they thought prices would rise from here we'd see lower margins today. We're not seeing that, which tells us they still dont want the business yet, because they expect further falls.

Batchy

all this talk of falls...I still dont think its all material at all.

My friend was getting excited about this house last night that was at 2004 price £100k, being marketed for 100k today (dropped 10k last month nov 10).

I showed him the one I brought, where a similar house on same road, same size style, although less desirable plot. sold for 195k in 2004, I just paid 165k

-0.1%

Its been said time and time again... the volumes of houses selling at the moment is likely to be showing falls as FTBs and STRs are returning to the market.

This means many chain free transactions, (a FTB buyers favourite) buy a house no one lives in, as they are now desperate to sell.

So what it means average FTB transaction is sub 250k, probably more like 140k... so there are a lot of these transactions.

The chains, normally consist of about 3-5 buyers and sellers

120k FTB
180k
240k
300k
500k

So with the No Chain Sales (desperate sellers, distressed sales) going through, its likely to bring the average down as you lose 4 of the 5 transactions potentially, normally the last 4 too... ie, higher priced!

The reason the Land registry is different, is because it compares Like 4 Like... so where a single property has appeared in the results more than once, sold 2001 for 50k, sold 2010 for 110k, only then is the average affected. This is why this is still showing increases (small yes, but still increases)

I believe you have to understand the statistics, drill them down, before you try to discuss and analyse and compare them to other statistics.

IMO although the land registry is government run, I do think its the most accurate, whole of the country, and excludes abnormalities like repossessions.

StevieJ

shortchanged wrote: »

Sorry to sound stupid but please explain.

Mortgage rates have disconnected from base rate as this does not reflect real interest rates, so the banks have to charge a premium over bank rate, when this reverses and UK base rate begins to normalise the margin over base rate should reduce. This doesn't obviously include those on very tasty lifetime trackers.

shortchanged_2

StevieJ wrote: »

Mortgage rates have disconnected from base rate as this does not reflect real interest rates, so the banks have to charge a premium over bank rate, when this reverses and UK base rate begins to normalise the margin over base rate should reduce. This doesn't obviously include those on very tasty lifetime trackers.

Cheers for that I get it now. Yes I do agree with you to some extent, although I did say in my previous post I'm not convinced we'll ever see banks offering deals as low as they have in the past.

There were a couple of BS's invoking the extreme circumstances clauses for customers because they couldn't cope with the ultra low interest rates. Will they be much more cautious in the future?

N1AK

GeneHunt wrote: »

As a result, we do not expect to see a significant fall in house prices.

I wouldn't be too reliant on them as an indicator of performance...

Nationwide in November 2007:

“Looking forward, it is clear that there are uncertainties in the market, not least from the continuing turmoil in
the UK’s financial markets and the overall impact that this may have on the future performance of the UK
economy. We already expect economic conditions to be more difficult for the housing market next year, but
we do not expect a recession. Furthermore, with interest rates on the way down and the continued issue of
undersupply of housing in the UK market, the underlying fundamentals are perhaps more positive than the
recent swings in sentiment might suggest.

That's what they said two years ago when house prices were looking considerably better than they are now. It was swiftly followed by an extremely hard drop.

sarkin1

Pete111 wrote: »

Hardly mate.

I've got a London flat that makes me a shed load as a rental and is worth 75-100k more than I paid for it and a big house in Kent with under 40% LTV that should be mortgage free within 3/4 years.

Desparate? If so then I heartily recommend it.

ra ra ra ra ra ra touched a nerve