What will it take to crash the housing market?

Is there anything that might cause the much-predicted crash in UK house prices? Not – evidently – a pandemic (which perversely caused prices to surge). A sharp, upwards jerk in the Bank of England’s base rate to 4.5 per cent didn’t do it either.

The latest edition of the Office for National Statistics’s UK House Price Index – the most comprehensive of house prices indices, but which tends to trail Halifax and Nationwide – shows that prices rose by an average of 4.1 per cent in the 12 months to March. That is down from 5.8 per cent in February and is lower than inflation, indicating a real-terms fall in house prices. But it hardly represents a crash. And according to Rightmove this week, asking prices are sharply upwards, indicating confidence among vendors that the market will track upwards in the coming months.