{"id":2893,"date":"2010-01-13T13:29:15","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T13:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2893"},"modified":"2025-03-27T15:48:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:48:56","slug":"uk-housing-recovery-continuing-prices-boost-to-xmas-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2893","title":{"rendered":"UK housing recovery continuing; prices boost to Xmas sales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some commentary has claimed that this week’s Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) survey for December signals renewed housing market weakness. Hardly. The survey suggests a slowdown in price gains – unsurprising given a 14% annualised rise in the Halifax index over the last eight months – but a further increase in turnover.<\/p>\n

True, the buyer enquiries index has fallen significantly from its peak in June last year. It remains, however, firmly in positive territory, consistent with further gains in mortgage approvals and transactions – see first chart. The new instructions index, meanwhile, has picked up recently but is still below buyer enquiries, suggesting that demand continues to outstrip supply.<\/p>\n

Commentators have also interpreted the British Retail Consortium (BRC) December sales survey, showing a rise in annual sales growth from 4.1% to 6.0%, as evidence of a pick-up in consumer spending. The increase, however, may have been due to higher inflation rather than stronger volumes – the annual gain in the BRC’s shop price index accelerated from 0.2% to 2.2% in December.<\/p>\n

Manufacturing output figures for November, released today, were disappointing, showing no increase from October. Relative to its pre-recession peak, however, UK output is at a similar level to France and higher than in Germany, Japan and Italy – second chart. In other words, the smaller recent recovery in the UK partly reflects a less severe prior decline.\ufeff<\/p>\n

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Some commentary has claimed that this week’s Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) survey for December signals renewed housing market weakness. Hardly. The survey suggests a slowdown in price gains – unsurprising given a 14% annualised rise in the Halifax index over the last eight months – but a further increase in turnover. True, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-moves-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5202,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893\/revisions\/5202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}