| Topic: | Re:Property Market Stable But Confidence Is Shaky??! | |
| Posted by: | Paul Pryce | |
| Date/Time: | 13/06/08 07:20:00 |
| People seem to be getting confused between falls in the asking price of individual properties and falls in the market in general. All a fall in the asking price tells you is that the property was overvalued when it first came to the market and some agents like Foxtons do that as a matter of policy. It is much easier to get a commission from a greedy vendor if you give them an over-optimistic valuation. I've been predicting that the market will fall for the last five years or so and have been consistently wrong. I remain amazed that Northern Rock, rising inflation and oil prices and a massive credit crunch in the mortgage market has not caused a huge correction in the market but the fact is at this stage there is no reliable evidence of a significant downturn in prices. All the available data is telling us that prices have fallen a bit but are still not far off peak levels having risen enormously. What has fallen sharply is the amount of transactions so maybe the market is in a kind of air pocket and will dip sharply later this year but the resilience of prices in the face of such awful fundamentals (and in my view chronic over-valuation) does suggest that there is still a reasonable amount of end user demand. A stable but low volume market is the worse possible outcome for estate agents so if they did want to manipulate the level of prices they would be talking them down to try and encourage greater turnover. |