The rise and fall of house prices can be a thorny subject, depending on your situation.
If you’re a first-time buyer struggling to get onto the property ladder, or you’re currently renting a property, you’re probably praying for a crash so that you’ll be able to afford a new home. Whereas current homeowners are likely to wish for further growth in the equity in their houses (despite every other house rising in price, making moving up the ladder more and more expensive). Regardless of your outlook, if you’ve taken an interest in house prices, you’ve probably noticed the conflicting figures that regularly get published. The Motley Fool may have the answer as to why there are so many differences.
Average house prices are reported by a variety of organisations, such as the two large mortgage lenders Nationwide and Halifax, property website Rightmove, and the Land Registry, and you many have noticed that every few months they release figures that rarely match up. As the Fool explains, this is because they all look at different sets of data:
The most important thing to understand is that each index collects data from a different stage in the homebuying process. So, for example, Rightmove looks at asking prices, while the Land Registry publishes data about actual house prices sold in a particular area.
Read more about house prices at the Motley Fool.