- Popular house price indicators measure different stages of the home buying process – often with significant lags
- Combined these different measures can tell us about the state of the UK property market
Buying a house can be a tortuous business: Rightmove estimates that it took 150 days to complete a sale in 2022 on average. This makes tracking the health of the UK property market a challenge: it takes five months for a property sale to go through, and even longer for house prices to appear in official statistics.
These long delays leave us with limited visibility – a problem when house prices matter in real-time. In an environment of rising interest rates, large mortgages become unaffordable as fixes roll off – both for would-be homeowners and households struggling with repayments. What’s more, the Bank of England fears that when house prices fall, homeowners risk negative equity and are more likely to cut down on spending as a result.