ROOF Blog

Fifty years ago, the average home cost £2,507 and one in seven had the loo outside. A half century on, the average home costs £162,085 but spare a thought for the two in every 1,000 households that still rely on an outside loo, according to research published by Halifax. The decade-by-decade data paints a picture of Britain today more divided than ever by regional house price differences. Halifax found that the region with the lowest prices in 1960 – Yorkshire and Humberside – remains the lowest, but said that every region in Britain has fallen further and further behind London. It said the difference was down to the rise in real earnings, which have increased more in Greater London than in any other region. However, incomes have failed to keep pace with rampant property prices everywhere. Halifax found that prices rose by 273 per cent in real terms between 1959 and 2009. Over the same period, the growth in real earnings was 169 per cent.

House prices defied the economic downturn last year to rise 1.1 per cent, boosted by a second-half surge in demand from homebuyers. The annual increase was the first rise over 12 months that Halifax, the mortgage lender, has recorded since March 2008. The latest rebound continued in December, with prices rising by 1 per cent over the month, the sixth monthly rise in a row, taking house prices to an average of £169,042 — 9.4 per cent higher than in April last year, when the market bottomed out. Despite the apparent buoyancy of the market, Halifax, now part of Lloyds Banking Group, gave a cautious outlook for the year ahead, warning that it expected house prices to remain flat during 2010.

The seemingly inexhaustible demand for property meant that house prices continued to rise last month, despite a fresh supply of stock coming on to the housing market.

The proportion of estate agents reporting an increase rather than a decrease in house prices was at its highest for three years, according to figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

The figures show that 35 per cent of surveyors reported rising rather than falling prices in the past three months, up from 34 per cent in October and the highest quarterly reading since November 2006.