The Guardian recently announced a record high in average house prices across the UK.
Although these record average house prices are good for existing home owners, it’s sadly not that beneficial to those yet to get on the housing ladder. Something that was raised with the parliamentary candidates recenlty in Ramsbottom.
Last Sunday (Sunday the 20th of April) at the Pre-Election debate in Ramsbottom, one of the talking points was what the parties will do to help people get onto the property ladder, and part of the reason was that due to the shortage of houses in the UK, the prices have increased. Thus putting them out of the range of first time buyers.
Based on this recent information, I set out to graph the average house prices across the UK and compare them to the average house prices for the North West.
Based on freely available data provided by The Halifax I created the graph below:
Sadly, The Halifax didn’t have quite enough data from the data set I used to bring it up to this month to validate what The Guardian with Rightmove have shown, but this does help to show that the UK is recovering from the property crash of a few years ago.
There are several interesting points in that graph where you can see the recovery in the North West outpacing that of the UK, or like in 2008 – 2010 it maintained an average where the national average was dropping.
Going back to the debate, all of the candidates essentially said that building more houses, or reusing existing houses is what we need to bring down the price of houses for buyers as opposed to just bringing in schemes as these don’t always benefit everyone, for example those stuck in a house too small for them.
Ramsbottom can be an expensive town to live in, however, this is due to the great businesses and environment we have around us. There is only so much space available in Ramsbottom so not everyone will be able to live there, but developments local to Ramsbottom do provide more affordable housing for those looking to get in on the propert ladder.
