Sunday 24 April 2011

The 'other' housing market, where house prices have regressed 60pc

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/8464483/The-other-housing-market-where-house-prices-have-regressed-60pc.html

Yet stray beyond London and the South East, and you see an altogether different picture, one that goes largely unrecorded by the established indices for measuring the UK housing market – Halifax, Nationwide, Rightmove and so on.


Unfortunately, they are more the exception than the rule. Little more than a stone's throw from these posher areas lies a tale of catastrophic decline and value destruction to match the very worst the sub-prime crisis has managed to produce in the US. Tens of thousands of houses in the North East alone will have fallen in value by 30-60pc since the peak, and by the look of it, still have further to go.


Today you'd be lucky to get half. Prices are fast regressing all the way back to where they came from before the bubble began.


Many of these investors will already be in substantial negative equity, but still they refuse to adjust their price expectations to the all too dire reality. So they hold on in the hope they can find the tenants to pay the mortgage and that prices will eventually recover. Denial is the order of the day.



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