Monday, August 30, 2010

U.K. Home Prices: Halifax and Nationwide July 2010

The latest release of the two most prominent home price indices for the United Kingdom are signaling that the trend up in U.K. home prices is continuing though at a slower pace than seen earlier in the year.

The “Nationwide” series, indicated that U.K. home prices declined slightly since last month but increased 6.59% on a year-over-year basis while the “Halifax” series indicated that prices showed an increase of 4.93% over the same period.

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 chart (click for full-screen dynamic chart) show the price movement since 1991 to each index.