Primelocation and house prices trend in London

You wouldn’t believe this. Apparently, the whole world real estate is going belly up, with the exception of -guess?- London! This accordingly to www.primelocation.com. If one had to believe their survey, in these troubled -t0 say the least- times, when US real estate is down 20% YoY -and this is for the lucky cities!-, London had a just temporarily dip of about 6% -May 08 to October 08), to then start a...

UK house prices down 1.2% in September

According to the Halifax index, UK house prices have been down 1.2% in September, with an annualized decline of 12.4% in the last quarter. It looks a given that house prices in UK have come down at least 10% from the peak, the question is where will they stop? I think the earnings ratio might give us some idea. At the peak, the ratio between house prices and earnings was 5.8 / 5.9, and it appears to have come down...

Length of real estate bear market

There was an interesting table on the FT last Saturday that reported the length and extension of house prices drop (the bear market) in 15 economies since 1970 (mainly Europe, USA + Japan, Korean, New Zealand and Canada). On Average, the bear market has lasted 6+ years, and the prices dropped between 16% (Canada) and 50% (Netherlands). UK had 2 bear markets, lasting only 3 / 4 years each, with prices dropping 26%...

Nestoria – smart house search

Nestoria is a vertical search engine focused on real estate with operations in UK and Spain. Founded by a few Spaniards -amongst which friend and former top dog for Yahoo Search Europe Javier Etxebeste- it aggregates information and data from other vertical engines and estate agencies, properly and smartly aggregate and present in a pleasant way. Extremely easy and intuitive to use, not useless bell and wistles, it...

UK house bubble bursts

An interesting article on this week Economist drives the attention on a few points with regard to the UK house bubble: the previous downturn lasted for almost a decade Halifax index (down 2.5% in March) is late recording the real market conditions. It registers prices when mortgages are agreed, which is a few weeks later to when prices are actually agreed between the parties. Apparently, prices are reportedly...