UK housing market loses £1bn in value

For the first time since 2011 the total value of the UK’s housing market has dropped. In the year to December 2017 the market lost £1.2bn in value, falling to a total of £259bn. The number of transactions dropped by 3.8% in England and Wales in 2017 to 884,329 – the lowest level since 2013. Every type of property recorded a fall in the number of sales, apart from semi-detached houses. Transactions rose very slightly for this property type, by around 5,000. Meanwhile transactions for flats and maisonettes dropped by 12.7%, or close to 20,000. The ONS statistics also revealed the regional differences: Barnet has had the highest median house price for 10 of the last 22 years (£7,775,000), compared to that of County Durham and Sunderland of just £24,000, while London had all 41 of the postcodes in the analysis in which houses fetched a median price of £2m or over.

The Daily Telegraph (20/06/2018) The Times (20/06/2018)