What does the coronavirus crisis mean for UK house prices?

With the whole country in lockdown, the UK property market is closed for business. John Stepek looks at what that means for UK house prices, housebuilders and for you.

The housing market is closed for business © Getty
(Image credit: House for sale sign © Bloomberg via Getty Images)

We’ve been in lockdown all week, and I’ve been writing about coronavirus nonstop. (In fact, it’s been such a busy week that I literally just stopped for a minute there to check that we’ve only been in lockdown for one week, and not two). And yet I realised that there’s something missing.

I haven’t said a word about the most important asset class in the UK. It’s time to rectify that oversight. Today we ask: “What does coronavirus mean for house prices?”

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.