The housing crash that never was

So is that the end of the property ‘crash’? Nationwide reported this week that its house price index was up by 0.7 per cent in January, already going some way to erasing the fall of 1.8 per cent it measured last year. The very similar Halifax index never even recorded a fall last year – it claims that prices rose by 1.8 per cent over the course of 2023, and by 1.1 per cent in December.

No one should take the Halifax and Nationwide indices too much to heart. They are based on data from a limited number of mortgage approvals – those handled by the lenders themselves – in contrast to the ONS house price index which uses data from almost every sale. As you can see from their divergence last year, Halifax and Nationwide often disagree with each other.   

But several things should be clear.