Land Value Taxation Campaign

According to the Nationwide Bulding Society's statistics, UK house prices continued to fall in July, The price of a typical house fell by 1.7% in July; the price of a typical house is now £15,000 lower than this time last year. Housing purchase activity reaches a new low and weakening economic conditions raise the likelihood of earlier interest rate cuts.

One has to ask why Nationwide bothers to collect these figures, though. What use is this information to them, since each individual house must be valued separately before making a mortgage advance. Fred Harrison has some ascerbic comments on the subject on his blog Renegade Economist. Surely they would do better to concentrate on their front line services rather than collecting and processing masses of data? There are enormous queues in some of the branches.

For what they are worth, these statistics represent a decline of 8.1 per cent over the past 12 months, the fastest since 1991 during Britain's last recession. Nationwide said that over the course of this year, house prices have fallen nine months in a row, and the July drops was more than double June’s 0.8 per cent fall. Standard & Poor's (S&P), the credit rating agency, said that 70,000 homeowners already have mortgage debt higher than the value of their homes. However, S&P expects the price of an average house to fall by a further 17 per cent into next year, plunging one in six homeowners into negative equity.