Xact Homes, which primarily serves the Solihull, Shirley, Knowle and Balsall Common areas, has been monitoring UK property trends to see how they impact the local market.
Rightmove cited current interest rates as one of the main reasons for June seeing the first monthly drop in asking prices in 2023, leaving the UK’s average asking price at £372,812. The portal says the dip will set the scene for the rest of the year, and expects asking prices to fall during the rest of 2023, resulting in a -2% annual drop by December.
Stability was the theme of Nationwide’s June House Price Index. It found house prices increased just +0.1% between May and June, levelling out the -0.1% dip seen between April and May. Interestingly, it said the higher interest rate had not yet affected the number of mortgage applications.
The UK’s rental market meanwhile continues to post record values. HomeLet’s June Rental Index showed rents had risen an average of +1.3% in the month, taking the average annual rent increase to 10.4%. The current average UK cost to rent a property is £1,229 per month.
HomeLet also illustrated how tenants are now spending 31.9% of their income on rent, a sentiment echoed by Zoopla, which found rental costs as a proportion of earnings had reached the highest for a decade, while rents had grown faster than average earnings over the last 21 months.