Are we on the verge of a double-dip in housing? The graph above, courtesy of Citi, certainly looks ominous enough. The blue line is a Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors metric for the balance of surveyors reporting rising house prices – and, last month, it slipped into negative territory for the first time since July 2009. The pink line is the rise in house prices, year on year – and it’s heading downwards too. At first glance, the picture looks a lot like the peak which preceded the crash in 2008. The question is whether we’re going to plumb a similar trough.
Citi, it must be said, are fairly sanguine about our prospects. Their briefing paper summarises the position thus:
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