More evidence that house prices are really falling [1] comes from the Nationwide building society, in its latest official house price index.
While it tries to draw attention more to annual figures in the accompanying commentary, which are still very much up, the quarterly figures for January to March 2008 are dreadful. House prices haven’t fallen across every region of the UK like this since the early 1970s:
[TABLE=5]
A few points:
- The negative spin would be that just as the bubble had spread out across the whole of the UK (instead of it being only London and the South East that went crazed, as in previous years), this time it’s bursting everywhere.
- If you were more bullish, you might say the uniformity of the falls reflects the impact of lenders making mortgages more expensive [2], rather than any particular changes in demand…
- …but still, doesn’t that drop in Northern Ireland of 10% have all the hallmarks of a bubble bursting?
You can download the first quarter 2008 figures from Nationwide [3] as a PDF, or just the figures for March [4].