House prices have further to fall

Tim Bennett rounds up this week’s personal finance news, including sliding house prices, the best deals on enhanced annuities and why execution-only traders should watch out.

House prices are falling at their fastest annual rate in three years, according to Nationwide. Prices fell by 0.7% month-on-month in July, and by 2.6% year-on-year the biggest annual fall since August 2009. That leaves prices a full 13% below their 2007 peak, ignoring the impact of inflation (which would make the figure even worse). Only London and the southeast bucked the trend.

However, other surveys suggest that even the London property engine room, bolstered by foreign buyers in the last few years, is running out of steam. Rightmove recently reported that asking prices had fallen by 3.6% in the capital in just one month. Add in this week's Bank of England mortgage approval data, which came in at an 18-month low, and further house price falls seem very likely for most of Britain this summer.

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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.