UK housing market freezes after lockdown

London

UK PROPERTY website Rightmove said it was unable to provide meaningful house price data for the month of March, due to a collapse in the number of new homes being listed for sale.

Rightmove - which typically advertises more than 90 per cent of houses for sale on behalf of British estate agents - said there had been an "abrupt turnaround" from the best start to a year since 2016 to new sales now being almost impossible.

"You do not have a functioning market when buyers cannot buy and sellers cannot sell, and so the focus needs to be on what is required to help the market recover once the lockdown can safely be eased," the company said.

Visits to its website fell by around 40 per cent at the time of the lockdown announcement but had started to recover slowly over the past week, it said.

For the "daily dwindling number" of properties put up for sale between March 8, before the lockdown began, and April 11, average asking prices were 2.1 per cent higher than the same period in 2019, it added.

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Britain's Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors warned on April 9 that the property market was coming to a "near standstill", and it predicted a record drop in sales.

On a related note, the number of British people leaving their homes to go shopping has slumped by 83 per cent since the government closed non-essential retail outlets last month to slow the spread of Covid-19, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) trade body said on Monday. Last week, the BRC said retail spending had fallen by more than a quarter in the same period compared with a year ago, and Monday's figures show the decline in the number of people going out has been even sharper.

"Footfall dropped in early March, as many people chose to stay at home and reduce the risk of catching coronavirus," BRC's chief executive Helen Dickinson said. "This downwards trajectory was accelerated by the government's decision to put the UK on lockdown."

Last week, Britain's budget forecasters said the economy could shrink by an unprecedented 35 per cent in the second quarter of 2020 if it was on lockdown for the next three months.

Supermarkets and other retailers of food and essential goods are still open, and the BRC said convenience stores had recorded increased traffic since the lockdown started on March 23. REUTERS