House prices fell by 2.5 per cent in May 08 |
House prices fell by 2.5 per cent in May, the Nationwide said today. The figure represents the biggest monthly fall recorded by the building society and is much worse than the 0.5 per cent expected by most economists.
The annual decline is also the biggest since December 1992 when house prices were falling at an annual rate of 6.3 per cent.
Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide's chief economist, said: "The pace of house price falls accelerated in May as more weak economic news added to the gathering momentum of negative sentiment about the housing market."
Would-be borrowers have been struggling to find mortgages following the credit crunch, but the building society said gloomy data from the Bank of England and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors had hit market confidence.
Nationwide's figures deal a blow to tentative hopes of a recovery after the British Bankers' Association earlier this week reported a small rise in the number of loans for house purchases, to 38,704, in April, although this remains 39 per cent below a year earlier
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Added on 04/06/2008 22:07:24
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