FT称英国住房市场夏季低迷后或迎秋季季节性回暖，但缺少可交易增量催化

Autumn can’t come soon enough for home sellers
We might still be in August, but the weather in the UK already seems to have turned a corner. For anyone looking to sell their house, I suspect autumn can’t come soon enough.
This is because the housing market is highly seasonal. Summer is the dead zone. And this summer has been deader than most: in fact, it has been drier than the nation’s desiccated lawns.
In July, despite the number of homes on the market being unusually high, the number that had found buyers was 9 per cent lower than a year ago, according to Zoopla. The market has been depressed by higher mortgage rates since the start of the conflict in the Middle East. Heatwaves and a World Cup have not helped, further dampening buyers’ enthusiasm to traipse around property viewings with unhappy kids and partners in tow.
Now, with September on the horizon, activity might finally be about to pick up again. Early data from Zoopla this week found that buyer searches in the past four weeks were up 7 per cent year-on-year.
In fact, if you’re looking to buy or sell a house, understanding how seasonality affects the market may even give you the upper hand in a negotiation.
When I was first starting out in the industry, I remember an old estate agent giving me some advice: sell in the spring, buy in autumn.
Even with the sluggish state of today’s market, you’d be hard pressed to follow suit — not to mention needing a very patient buyer. Still, he wasn’t wrong.
Spring is when buyer demand is at its highest. Homes spend the shortest time on the market between April and June, according to data from Rightmove. Land Registry data shows that, outside stamp duty holidays, the end of June is the most popular time to complete.
And since many people want to be in their new homes for Christmas, by autumn, as the supermarkets start filling up with mince pies and blaring out Noddy Holder far too early, sellers might start thinking more realistically about what price they’re willing to accept.
But understanding seasonality is not just about getting the best price — it is crucial for anyone trying to make sense of what’s going on in the housing market. Every week seems to bring new headlines of house prices going up, down or sideways — sometimes in two different directions in the space of a few days.
So how does it work? Most housing stats you read about are seasonally adjusted. For example, when the Bank of England reported that there were 60,000 mortgage approvals for house purchase in January this year, the actual number was only 44,800 but the higher seasonally adjusted figure reflects that the lower January number still kept the year on track for 60,000 approvals per month. The difference is made up in other months, when approvals are higher than the seasonally adjusted figure.
The benefit of seasonal adjustment is that we can easily compare monthly changes, giving us better insight into what is happening to the market over the short term, while annual changes should be unaffected by the process.
Christmas comes at the same time every year (even as the supermarket lead-up gets longer) so its effects on the market are relatively consistent. Easter, as a moveable feast, is another matter. Its timing and that of the school holidays around it can have a big impact on the weekly pattern of listings and sales agreed, affecting the data published by the property portals and any decisions about when to sell — something a good local agent should be on top of.
For house prices, seasonality means we normally know what the house price growth for the year will be by summer. Ignoring seasonal adjustments shows that house prices tend to start the year strongly, rising in the first six months before easing slightly over the summer and then stabilising in November and December.
Events can get in the way, of course. This year started much like any other, with the Nationwide house price index reporting price rises in the first few months that would have put it on track for annual growth of around 5 per cent based on normal patterns. Then Donald Trump happened. The higher interest rates connected to the war in the Middle East meant the trajectory tailed off earlier than usual. Now its index looks set to end the year up around 2 per cent — don’t hold me to that, though, as autumn tends to be when any economic shocks hit (from the financial crisis to Liz Truss) and the global economy is looking pretty fragile at the moment.
One house price measure that’s not seasonally adjusted frequently catches out headline writers and must bamboozle the general public. It is the Rightmove asking price index. Aside from it being an index of asking prices, not house prices, it can snake around a bit.
In May it said asking prices were up 1.2 per cent on the previous month; in August they were 2 per cent down. It paints a volatile picture — until you factor in that prices nearly always fall in August.
While the Rightmove index is a useful leading indicator, it is probably best to ignore the monthly fluctuations when assessing what it means for the wider housing market.
A feature of the Rightmove index is its weighting to the top end of the market. The seasonal volatility in its asking price index is greater for larger properties (five beds or more) than smaller ones. That can sometimes affect its overall index when there are big divergences in the fortunes of those markets — like now. Top-end homes are piling up on the market, which possibly explains why the Rightmove index is reporting 1 per cent annual price falls, compared with rises from the likes of Nationwide (1.8 per cent).
So seasonal adjustment is useful, but it is not always perfect. Look at the transaction data HM Revenue & Customs put out when the pandemic hit.
To make the seasonal adjustment process work, you need to exclude any unique events that might have had a one-off effect on the market (a regular example being the end of stamp duty holidays). In 2020, the shutdown of the whole housing market and the collapse in transactions clearly affected HMRC’s process, adding additional volatility to historic data.
It was quickly corrected the following month, but this highlights why it is important to keep an eye on the underlying data, especially around large unique events.
Back to this year, and the hot summer was yet another excuse in a long line of economic, political and other reasons to delay decisions on buying or selling.
The real estate industry will hope that this autumn will finally mark the start of the recovery, but, as the leaves turn orange, it will largely depend on what happens to the global economy — and what a world leader of the same colour decides to do — and on whether interest rates fall enough for the market to bounce.
Neal Hudson is a housing market analyst