House price rise is not all it seems

Tim Bennett rounds up the week's personal finance news, including the lie behind the rise in house prices, the good news for festive bargain-hunters, and the new debit card for kids.

House prices rose 2% this month year-on-year, according to property consultancy Rightmove. However, sellers shouldn't get too excited Rightmove focuses on asking prices (what a seller hopes to get), not completion prices (what they actually sell the property for). There's another reason to be wary too, if you live outside London.

The average asking price across England and Wales may be up to £236,761, but most of that is down to a mini-boom in the capital, driven largely by overseas buyers from Europe and the Middle East seeking a safe haven for their cash. Strip out London, and the rise is a more modest 0.2%. And anyone selling in the northeast or southeast can ignore the headline data asking prices fell 5.7% and 4.5% respectively in those regions.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.