U.K. Housing Market Improves as London Survey Shows Increase

By Brian Swint

July 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.K. housing market improved last month as more London real-estate agents and surveyors said home values increased rather than fell for the first time in 20 months, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said.

Across Britain, the number of respondents saying prices dropped exceeded those reporting gains by 18.1 percentage points, the highest reading since September 2007, RICS said in its monthly survey released today in London. The balance for the capital became positive for the first time since October 2007.

The two-year long collapse in prices may be starting to end as the U.K. starts to emerge from its deepest recession in a generation. The Bank of England last week declined to extend its emergency bond-buying program, waiting until next month to reexamine its forecasts for economic growth and inflation.

“There’s a lot more optimism,” Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at RICS, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “There has been a wholesale shift in sentiment.”

A majority of surveyors now expect property prices to increase for the first time since May 2007, RICS said today. The indexes for new sales and buyer interest rose to the highest since 1999, according to the report.

While U.K. gross domestic product fell 2.4 percent in the first quarter, the most since 1958, the economy may now be stagnating, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said last week. Warmer weather helped push up same- store retail sales in June by 1.4 percent from a year earlier, the British Retail Consortium said in a separate report today.

Long Haul

The economy has probably hit bottom and will pick up over time, Bank of England Deputy Governor Charles Bean said in an interview on BBC Radio Leeds yesterday. The recovery may be “a long haul,” he said.

Lloyds Banking Group Plc’s Halifax division last week said that house prices fell 0.5 percent in June and 12.5 percent from a year earlier. Stephen Nickell, chair of the National Housing Planning and Advice Unit, said that the market won’t recover until banks become more willing to provide loans.

House prices are likely to fall further into next year before stagnating in 2011, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP predicted in a report today.

“The recovery looks like it’s still going to be very patchy,” RICS’s Rubinsohn said. “Finance is still in short supply and unemployment is likely to keep rising.”

Parliament’s Communities and Local Government Committee said today that the government must do more to assist mortgage financing and encourage more homebuilding. The cost of two-year fixed mortgages rose to the highest this year in June, Bank of England data showed last week.

Homes Shortage

The outlook for house prices may be brighter because of a shortage of homes on the market. The average number of properties on agents’ books fell to 56.9 from 58.5 last month, a drop of 32 percent from a year earlier, RICS said.

The RICS index for prices was positive this month for London, the southwest and the southeast of England. The lowest index reading was for the West Midlands, where it was minus 48.

The Bank of England on July 9 kept the benchmark interest rate at 0.5 percent and refrained from expanding its 125 billion pound ($201 billion) asset-purchase plan. Policy makers will make their next interest-rate decision on Aug. 6.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Swint in London at bswint@bloomberg.net.