House price growth slows
House prices in Britain rose by 1.1 per cent in April, Halifax says, due in part to "easing demand".The building society says its index has unveiled the slowest monthly rise so far this year, and the second smallest since July 2006.According to Halifax annual house price inflation now stands at 10.9 per cent, down from 11.1 per cent in March.And despite 59 consecutive quarters of growth, the firm says market conditions are now the "tightest for nearly three years", attributable to the stock of unsold property on estate agents' books. "There is accumulating evidence of a slight easing of conditions in the housing market with further signs of moderation in both demand and activity in the past month," commented Martin Ellis, Halifax's chief economist."Demand remains healthy which, together with tight supply, continues to push up prices. Good economic growth and a strong labour market will continue to support healthy housing demand. "Negative real earnings growth and the increase in interest rates since last August, however, are expected to exert increasing pressure on householders' finances, resulting in [a] slowdown in house prices," Mr Ellis concluded.The Bank of England is widely expected to raise interest rates by a quarter of a per cent to 5.5 per cent today.
Share this..
Related stories
Complain, complain, complain
How many times over the last 12 months have you bought an item or paid for a particular service which you have found to be substandard? However, how many times have you actually complained?
If you were to revisit the number of items you have acquired which were substandard or services you have paid for over a 12 month period it is highly likely you will have spent hundreds if not th...
Charles Bean warns of central bank intervention
Charles Bean, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, has today suggested that central banks around the world may well need to step back into the fray and prop up ailing economies. Despite the fact that central banks around the world effectively bailed out the financial sector in the early days of the worldwide recession it seems as though another bout of funding may well be required in the sh...
Read MoreBarclays top bosses waive 2009 bonuses
In a move which is sure to put more pressure on the rest of the UK banking sector it has been revealed that John Varley and Bob Diamond, the two most prominent figures in the Barclays bank operation, have waived their bonuses for 2009. At a time when the bank has put aside nearly £3 billion for staff bonuses it is unclear exactly what bonuses the two executives would have been entitled to, althou...
Read MoreFallout to hit Skipton Building Society
As we covered in one of our earlier articles, the Skipton Building Society has effectively ripped up and rewritten thousands of mortgage arrangements using a get out clause introduced in 2002. The company has used the prolonged period of low base rates in the UK as a means of rewriting the terms of its standard variable rate mortgage which prior to yesterday could not be more than three percentage...
Read MoreBarclays Bank reports £3.95 billion profits
Barclays Bank, the UK banking giant, has today reported a profit of £3.95 billion for the first six months of 2010. While the vast majority of the profit, £3.4 billion, came from the company's Barclays Capital investment arm there has been a general improvement in trading within the UK banking sector. So can we now expect liquidity to improve? In-line with the earlier reporting of profitabili...
Read More