By Jennifer Ryan
April 20 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. house prices rose for a third month in April after mortgage availability improved, Rightmove Plc said today.
The average asking price rose 1.8 percent from March to 222,077 pounds ($328,000), the operator of the biggest U.K. residential property Web site said today. It fell 3.2 percent in London, the only region of 10 surveyed to show a decline. Home prices are down 7.3 percent from a year earlier.
Mortgage approvals rose 19 percent in February as the Bank of England cut the key interest rate to a record low of 0.5 percent and started buying assets to ease credit strains in the economy. Policy maker Kate Barker said yesterday house prices may rebound as banks ease lending terms.
“It looks like we are now bumping along the bottom of the trough,” Miles Shipside, Rightmove’s commercial director, said in the statement. “For there to be any real sense of optimism that we’re on a sustainable road to recovery, the availability of mortgage finance needs to improve significantly.”
The increase in property prices demanded by sellers was led by East Anglia, where values increased 5.1 percent, and Wales, which showed a 4.8 percent gain.
The decline in London, where the average asking price was 403,505 pounds, was led by a 7.8 percent drop in Ealing. Average values in the capital’s most expensive neighborhood, Kensington & Chelsea, fell 3.3 percent on the month to 1.9 million pounds.
Central bank data show mortgage approvals climbed to 38,000 in February, the most since May. The reading is still down from 71,000 at the start of 2009.
“I expect house prices to move up again,” Barker told the Spectator magazine on April 16. Referring to restrictions on the proportion of a home’s value that banks are willing to finance, she said, “the big slide down to 75-80 percent may be overdone. So I would expect the mortgage market to move.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Ryan in London at Jryan13@bloomberg.net
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