Hi this is my first blog post, thank you for the invite!

I will be writing informally about topics I hope to be useful to my peers and posts for the wider public.

Price moves in the property market have recently sparked discussions over a possible recovery.

Optimists claim that property prices are on the rise again, and that this will materialise in a sustained trend. They claim that property prices have dropped so much that properties are generally undervalued. Some economists predict that the numbers of homes put on the market will be far inferior to the demand. This shortage will cause, according to RICS (the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors), an overall increase in annual house prices, contrarily to most predictions so far. I quote Brigid O’Leary, Rics senior economist: “There has been a clear change in the housing market over the past few months and, as a result, it is unlikely that we will now see the kind of house price falls widely predicted at the start of the year.”

As agents, we have seen more transactions happening, but the main challenge lies in mortgages attributions. The proportion of  ‘approvals in principle’ from mortgage lenders, which fail to materialise in a formal offer, remains high, and the situation is unlikely to change quickly enough.

The real question underlying these forecasts is over which signal to trust. In other words, which factors are the most important in determining the evolution of property prices?