No Smiles for Conveyancers if Cheshire is Right

Are we about to see a significant dip in house prices in London in the near future?

Bloomberg News recently asked seven market commentators to predict what they see happening next in London’s 1.6 trillion-pound housing market.

Paul Cheshire, professor of economic geography at The London School of Economics and Political Science:

“The turning point is just being reached. Housing prices have continued to rise relative to incomes and the affordability ratio is now at an all-time low. Real incomes are falling as the weakness in the pound feeds through to higher inflation. The ability to raise wages isn’t there and Brexit is making everything more uncertain and worse. London is the epicenter of the U.K. housing market and changes in prices there tend to ripple out. I’m expecting a sharp correction in housing, more on the level of the 1990 crash. I don’t expect negative equity to be as big of a problem as it was then, and interest rates may rise but will still remain low by the standards of the early 1990s.”

NOTE: House prices fell about 32% in London from 1989 through 1992, according to data compiled by Nationwide Building Society.

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