Latest house price news from Halifax and Nationwide

While both Halifax and Nationwide have confirmed further falls in house prices for March, their reports aren’t as gloomy as you might imagine. Nationwide were the first to release figures and reported that house prices fell on average 0.6% in March with the annual change still in credit at 1.1%. This is the fifth consecutive month that prices have fallen, and they now put the average house price at £179,110. In contrast, Halifax reported a much bigger fall for March of 2.5%, but agreed with Nationwide on the annual change, and had a similar average price of £191,556. The reason the figures differ is that although they use similar methodology, each set of results are based on the lenders own customers. Both lenders expect there to be modest falls in house prices this year with Halifax explaining that they expect the fall to be “low single digit”. They also said that any declines need to be viewed in the context of the “significant price rises over recent years” and quoted an average rise of 51% over the last 5 years. In practical terms, the 2.5% fall reported by Halifax has knocked £4,500 off the average price of a UK home, but it is still worth over £2,000 more than this time last year.