A spokesman for Ernst and Young, Dougald Middleton, said, “While the survey shows that costs of borrowing have eased over the last quarter, we think credit conditions have turned over the last three or four weeks.”

The outlook seems distinctly gloomy for consumers, and banks are blaming this forecast on the tightening of wholesale funding. Conversely, the default rate on mortgages and loans has fallen, so it’s good news for the banks at least.

House Price Index
is a government site publishing monthly housing market statistics. For serious research, this site and its associated pages are a mine of information: you will find year-on-year comparisons; statistics relating to new buyers and owner-occupiers; regional variations and all manner of related data

Our Property
provides information from the Land Registry on the actual selling prices of UK wide property; in short, this site helps you see beyond the estate agents’ patter. If you’re looking to buy, you’ll know whether the asking price is realistic or inflated and, if you’re selling, you’ll be more realistic about what your property will achieve.

Property Snake
is the opposite of the property ladder in that it shows you properties where the selling price has been reduced. The site is run by an anonymous owner in his or her spare time; having said that, we tried it out with a couple of post codes and the information was remarkably accurate.

Priced Out
is a campaigning website for first time buyers and provides some very useful links for this particular group.

UK Property Auctions
does exactly what it says on the tin – it is a portal to the UK property auction market.

Bank of England
this is self-explanatory. However this link will take you straight to the Monetary Policy decision page where you will find the latest on interest rates.

Which Way Homes
explains the ups and downs of the property market in a down-to-earth, jargon-free way.

If you find other useful sites or would like to comment on the sites listed above, why not tell us on the forum?

Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, Ian Campbell explains:

The problem stems from lack of funds for both lending banks and first time buyers. Lending banks previously relied on deposits made by UK savers backed up by borrowing from residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) – two thirds of RMBS were sold to foreign investors. Then, in 2008, the RMBS market ceased to exist, having been bought by the US Federal Reserve. The Bank of England set up two special funding schemes to help fill the gap left by the RMBS but both are due to end in 2014. When that happens, the Council of Mortgage Lenders calculates that Britain’s lenders will face a funding gap of £300 billion.

These are the facts behind the rise in deposits – first-time buyers are being asked for almost three-times the deposit they would have put down three years ago. No wonder then that, whilst mortgage approvals improved last year, they only reached half the levels of the boom years.

So, lack of funds leads to lower house prices; the average would have to fall 17% for the ratio of price to earnings to get back the long term level of 4 from the current 4.8. The powers that be need to make a concerted effort to prop up growth and earnings if the property market isn’t to fall even farther than before.

Property Bee works alongside the agents listed below and shows any changes in price and details since the property was listed. In brief, you can find the following information:

• When the property was put on the market
  
• Price changes (up and down) since the property was listed
  
• Whether the property has gone STC and come back onto the market
  
• Any changes to the details since the property was listed
  

This is powerful information to have in hand when bargaining.

What Estate Agents does Property Bee Work with?

What does Property Bee Cost?

Nothing! Property Bee is free to download and use.

Firefox

If you don’t use Firefox, that’s no problem, although it is rated as one of the best internet browsers available. However, you can hang on to your favourite browser; Firefox can be installed along side your existing Web browser and you can even use both at the same time if you wish. Firefox is available for Windows, Linux and Macs.

To install Firefox: go to mozilla.org and follow the prompts.

To use Property Bee: go to Property-Bee and click the ‘download’ button on the left and follow the prompts. Next time you search for properties on any of the linked agents, any alterations in prices and details will appear as if by magic.

Free Property Valuation

Here’s a guide to some of the best:

What Price are Houses on your Street Fetching?

Don’t, whatever you do, make the mistake of going to a website that charges you for this information when you can get it for free! Instead, go to any of the following sites and key in your postcode or the name of a street you’re interested in, et voila, you will see what houses in that area are currently going for. Oh, and your neighbour’s house, the one that sold last week, won’t appear for about three months…

A word to the wise about getting excited when you see the prices for houses in your street in the local estate agents’ windows – these prices are set with a margin for ‘knocking down;’ asking prices are rarely achieved.

How to Find Properties that have Dropped the Asking Price

Well, almost.

Despite receiving a largely clean bill of health from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the year-long study found that a third of all sellers were unhappy with the level of their estate agents’ fees. In fact, the study found that haggling over commission could negotiate down from 1.8% of the selling price to 1.4%, saving £800 on the sale of a £200,000 home, yet, only 30% of house sellers shop around among estate agents or negotiate on fees. The total extra paid during 2007 by those who failed to negotiate fees amounted to an extra £570 million going to the estate agents.

However, this revelation did not draw any criticism from the estate agents themselves; what did cause them dissatisfaction was their belief that the report missed out on an opportunity to set out a plan for ‘robust’ protection for buyers and sellers. As Trevor Kent, a former president of the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) so eloquently put it: “a poodle clipper today can be an estate agent tomorrow.”

The OFT felt that existing legislation relating to traditional estate agents was “comprehensive and wide-ranging, and that further regulation was unnecessary” given that, in recent years, people had become happier with the service provided.

In 2007, the UK estate agency market was estimated to be worth £6.7 billion, which came from roughly 1.6 million transactions; it is difficult to quantify the current worth of the market due to the slump of the housing market since then.

Gross lending for January 2010, at £9.1 billion, came in at the lowest monthly level since February 2000; a third down on December and 21% down year on year.

The housing market as a whole was hit hard by recession, which belies the recent monthly property value rises. These rises in price have more to do with a lack of properties for sale than they do with any imminent recovery; it has also been aided of course, by the continuing low interest rates.

It is thought that better than expected unemployment rates are helping the market – although unemployment rates have risen considerably, the fact that many employers have opted to reduce working hours and pay rather than make employees redundant has meant that the unemployment figures are not as high as had been expected.

These figures were published the day after the  Bank of England reported that there were 57,345 approved property purchase loans in October – the 11th consecutive monthly increase.  However, there are signs that the positive trend is slowing down and economists are still predicting a return of falling house prices for 2010.

Every coin has two sides, however, and it was interesting to read that, according to a Barclays survey, twice as many people plan to increase their investment in residential and commercial property as intend to reduce.  The survey reveals that real estate investment among wealthy individuals is set to rise from its current 28% to 30% of the average portfolio for the next few years.  One of the more surprising findings was that  emotional attachment to bricks and mortar often means that rich investors less rigorous in measuring the return on their investment and can, in fact, be unwilling to sell real estate at short notice.  This despite the fact that properties used as the owner’s principle residence were excluded from the figures.

Of British and Indian investors, almost 30% have more than 50% of their wealth tied up in property and, of those respondents with more than £30 million, 40% had over half their wealth in bricks and mortar.

Well, if it’s good enough for them… read more about opportunities in the housing market

It’s a time honoured phrase that’s just as apt for the property market as for any other – it can pay to cut out the middle man.  In fact, some estimates give a figure of 1 in 20 homes as being sold without the services of an estate agent.

A survey by the Alliance & Leicester (before they became part of Santander in this year’s banking shake-up) reported that private home-sellers sold their homes in an average of less than two months; those using the more conventional estate agency route were taking over three months.  And the sheer economics of scale make going estate agent free attractive too, what with the average value of a home sitting at around £200,000 (FT House Price Index) and estate agency fees ranging from 1 per cent to 2.5 per cent.

The OFT has published four research reports this month as part of its market study into home buying and selling. These comprise a survey of estate agents, a survey of trading standard services and both qualitative and quantitative consumer research; that is, they have looked at hard facts as well as people’s experiences.  This is important and valuable research that, hopefully, will lead to some sort of regulation of private-sale websites, of which there are currently over 40, each offering different levels of service at prices ranging from nothing to £500.

One major contributor to the research was The Little House Company, the UK’s leading private sales website – and a company so successful that all the major UK property portals have banned their listings! Which is why, in the interests of fair play, we’ve included the link.