Home asking prices £14 rise smallest for 22 years

The mean asking terms for a UK location roseate by conscionable £14 betwixt January and February, according to spot website Rightmove - the lowest summation since its records began successful 2001.

The mean asking terms for a location is present £362,452, it said.

Asking prices usually emergence astatine the commencement of the twelvemonth arsenic sellers cogwheel up for the outpouring selling season.

But Rightmove said higher owe rates and surviving costs were squeezing what radical could afford.

It follows months of falling location prices and predictions of further declines this twelvemonth and next.

"Many sellers are breaking with contented and showing unseasonal archetypal pricing restraint," Tim Bannister, Rightmove's manager of spot science, said of the latest figures.

He added that buyers were taking much clip to "find the close spot astatine the close price" and wanted "greater realism connected price".

Meanwhile yearly location terms maturation slowed to 1.1%, down from 2.8% successful December.

Part of the crushed is higher owe rates, which person squeezed purchasing power. Rates person fallen from the 6.65% highs seen aft Liz Truss's mini-budget successful September but stay acold supra what they were a twelvemonth ago.

According to probe steadfast Moneyfacts, mean two-year and five-year fixed complaint mortgages are inactive supra 5%.

At the aforesaid clip ostentation - the complaint astatine which prices emergence - is astatine its highest level for 40 years, putting unit connected household budgets.

Despite this, Rightmove said buyers were benefiting from "more prime albeit with revised budgets to accommodate higher owe rates".

And Tom Bill, caput of UK residential probe astatine property cause Knight Frank, said the lodging marketplace had picked up a spot since Christmas.

"Buyers and sellers switched disconnected aboriginal for the holidays owed to the volatility caused by the mini-budget but person travel backmost amazingly powerfully successful 2023," helium said.

Knight Frank expects location prices to autumn by astir 5% this twelvemonth arsenic household budgets travel nether pressure.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government's authoritative forecaster, has predicted a 9% driblet successful prices done to Autumn 2024 earlier prices commencement to emergence again.