U.S. Invasion: U.K. Home Prices March 2009

The two most prominent and long running monthly U.K. housing price indices continue to register serious year-over-year declines resulting in the largest peak decline seen in at least 17 years.

The “Nationwide” series, which reported data through February, indicated that U.K. home prices declined 17.6% on a year-over-year basis while the “Halifax” series which reported data through March indicated that U.K. home prices declined 17.65% on a year-over-year basis.

Both indices are similar to our own S&P/Case-Shiller data series in that they both implement a methodology that seeks to standardize the quality homes included as source data and track the price changes occurring between sales instead of simply tracking the distorted average or median sales price.

The following charts (click for larger) show the price movement since 1991 to each index.

Notice that annual price appreciation peaked in 2003 and continued to weaken consistently until early 2008 when it actually devolved into annual depreciation.