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5 March 2013updated 26 Sep 2015 3:01pm

House price “hope”—for whom?

The have-nots don't get a word in.

By Alex Hern

As if to underscore the message of Through the keyhole, our week of themed posts on Britain’s housing crisis, YouGov has released its Household Economic Activity Tracker for February, which reports an improvement in economic optimism of 3.5 points to 98 (where 100 on the index is neither optimistic nor pessimistic).

The report states:

YouGov’s data suggest the driving force in this improvement is a growing belief among home owners that the property market has stopped falling and has actually strengthened – especially in London. One in three (29%) people in the capital believe house prices rose in February compared with just 7% who think they fell. In the UK as a whole, just 14% of respondents in February thought their home decreased in value during the previous month, down from 18% in January and 27% in August 2012.

For the first time since mid-2010, the average homeowner expects prices to rise over the coming year. Almost a third (31%) of respondents expect house prices to be higher a year from now, more than double the percentage (14%) who think they will be lower. Survey respondents are looking for a 0.6% rise in home prices on average over the coming year, compared with the 0.1% decrease they expected last month.

This property bounce appears to be having a positive effect on the homeowners’ household finances, with fewer households reported a deteriorating financial situation compared to last month. Those who believe the value of their house increased during February were twice as likely to think their overall financial situation had improved compared to those who thought their property’s value had stagnated or declined (9.2% to 4.6%).

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It’s only a measure of expectations, so shouldn’t be taken as any sort of valid prediction of the future of the housing market. But what interested me, in the context of our housing week, is the apparently unthinking tone taken in the release, which is even headed House price hope sees economic optimism reach two year high. Owner-occupiers are still the most common type of households in Britain, making up 65 per cent of the total according to government statistics, but that’s been on a downward trend since it peaked in 2003 at 71 per cent. For 35 per cent of the nation, the fact that house prices are rising again does not represent “hope” at all — it pushes the chance of ever owning a home further into the distance, and is likely to feed through to higher rents in the future.

That gap, between owner-occupiers and others, is largely a generational divide, and there are some who will be able to look to parents for the nest-egg they need when they feel the time is right. But that just strengthens the other divide, between the haves and have-nots. And this report highlights that mostly, when we speak of the “health” of the housing market, the have-nots don’t get a word in.

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