Halifax Housing Market Confidence Tracker

More Britons expect house prices to rise rather than fall over the next twelve months, according to the Halifax Housing Market Confidence tracker, conducted by Ipsos.

More Britons expect house prices to rise rather than fall over the next twelve months, according to the Halifax Housing Market Confidence tracker. Now, 29% think the average property price in the UK will fall. 22% think it will rise. The headline House Price Outlook (HPO) balance has therefore moved into positive territory with an overall balance score of +7 percentage points. This reverses the picture in October 2011 when a plurality were negative about prices; 28% thought they would rise, 30% predicted a fall. Among owner-occupiers the equivalent HPO figures are 28% and 24%, +4. This is an improvement since October when the HPO was -7.

Other headlines:

  • Most regions expect an increase in house prices but Londoners are the most optimistic (+21).
  • Public sentiment still points to a house buyer’s market and one which isn’t favourable to the seller. Half (50%) think the next 12 months would be a good time to buy a property while only 10% think the same of selling. Three-quarters of adults (74%) and four in five owner-occupiers (78%) think it would be a bad time to sell. Among the latter, 30% consider the next twelve months to be a very bad time to sell.
  • Underlining the lack of buy/sell equilibrium in the market at least in terms of sentiment, only 9% of owner-occupiers think the period will be a good time to both buy and sell. Just under half (48%) think it will be a good time to buy, but not to sell.

Technical note

  • Interviews with representative sample of 2,009 British adults aged 16+ (incl. 1,301 owner/occupiers).
  • Undertaken face-to-face, in-home between 6-19 January 2012 in 155 sampling points across Britain.
  • Data weighted to the national population profile by age, sex, working status, social grade, region, ethnicity and tenure.
  • An asterisk (*) represents a value of less than one half or one percent, but not zero. Where results do not sum to 100%, this may be due to computer rounding.

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