House Prices Falling

After a few days when of being a bit less worried about the future, the first thing that I heard when I switched on the radio yesterday morning was that the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) are expecting house prices to fall. Although most surveyors had seen no change in the past three months those seeing a decline in prices outnumbered those reporting a rise.

Despite all the recent talk about house prices already beginning to fall I was surprised that it was the first time since last July that the monthly survey has detected a downturn.

The most worrying thing is that the RICS survey is usually a good indicator of the way thing are going.

On the plus side the survey was only of 242 opinions and of those 64% had seen no change in prices in the past 3 months, so in actual fact perhaps the headline should have been "Most RICS Report Stable House Prices".

Not a great start to a Monday morning.