House price fall: what's the effect?

Last Modified: 08 Apr 2008
By: Faisal Islam

It's the steepest fall in house prices since the early 90s' property crash. Faisal Islam reports.

Britain's largest mortgage lender, the Halifax, today reported an average 2.5 per cent fall in the value of homes during March. The last time there was a bigger slump in monthly figures was September 1992.

Overall, homes have lost 1 per cent of their value in the first quarter of this year, but there are marked regional variations with house prices in the West Midlands falling 5 per cent, Wales going down 4.7 per cent while at the other end of the scale, homes in the East Midlands rose 2.2 per cent in the same period. So is this a welcome correction of the market or the beginnings of a crash?

Expert analysis

Watch Cathy Newman's report which also includes a studio discussion with Melanie Bien from Savills Private Finance, Ed Stansfield, a property economist at Capital Economics, and Jonathan Davis of the website housepricecrash.co.uk (which describes itself as a counterbalance to the huge amounts of positive spin on the property market) offer their views on the housing market.