UK housing market and house prices - educate yourself

Do you want to be 'in the know' before everyone else reading the papers. if so, I have found that the best place to look on the net is the website Home.co.uk, specifically at this page.


The folks at Home.co.uk do a monthly synopsis (in the form of a PDF report) of the housing market, based on their asking price index. They cover a huge amount of the houses being sold in the UK and hence can give a really thorough and up-to-date coverage of the UK housing market state of play:

The Home.co.uk Asking Price Index is calculated every month using more than 700,000 UK house prices found in the Home.co.uk Property Search Index. This figure represents the majority of the property for sale on the open market in the UK at any given time. Properties above £1m and below £20k are excluded from the calculations.

Typically the media reacts to information supplied to them by estate agents. However, this has to be processed and the lag can be a month or two. Therefore all of this info is way out of date and you may be missing out on recent market developments. If you had the time to constantly monitor the market by regularly viewing properties, you would get a first hand view of your local market. However, this takes a lot of time and if you're merely dipping your toes into the current market trend, you could do a lot worse that to run by Home.co.uk and look at their monthly summary of their asking price index.

You can also look at coverage of your specific area at this page.