19/05/2008

40% Drop In House Sales According To RICS

Sales of houses could fall by 40% this year according to a study by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

RICS warned this rapid decline will effect house buyers who are looking for a mortgage as the credit crunch bites.

Adding further to property owners woes, prices are to slip by around 5%. The organisation also predicts that repossessions will rise to 43,000 in 2008 compared to 76,000 during 1991.

In the 2008 Housing Forecast published by the RICS it states: "It is hard to ignore the sheer weight of negative news stories surrounding the residential property market at this point in time. Access to mortgage products is being restricted, the levels of transactions have pluged and prices do now appear to be slipping whichever index one looks at."

Commenting on whether the current economic climate could bring about a wave of forced selling of property, it said there is "precious little evidence for such an assertion" and that news instructions to sell have actually declined in ten out of the last eleven months.

RICS Chief Economist Simon Rubinsohn said: "This could have important ramifications for the wider economy - not only hitting the property industry directly but also impacting on a broad range of related sectors, whether high street purveyors of home furnishings and white goods or financial intermediaries involved in providing mortgage advice."

Summarising the RICS said: "Our best guess is that prices will continue to gently ease back during the remainder of 2008 which will leave the DCLG index around 5% lower in the final quarter of the year compared with the eqivalent period of 2007.

"On the upside, the imbalance between the demand and supply could help provide a floor under prices particularly if the credit cruch shows some signs of thawing in response to central bank initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic."

The RICS also said the drastic fall-off in deals could hit consumer spending by more than 8% compared with last year.

In the past month house prices have dropped in the West London suburbs of Ealing by 2.7% and Hammersmith and Fulham by 1.6%.

RICS predicts the fall in house prices will be less severe than that of the early 1990s.

(CD/JM)

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