While UK house prices marginally increased in October, all regions have seen values drop on an annual basis amid increasing affordability pressures.
Property prices fell faster in the Wapping area of London than anywhere else in England and Wales last month.
According to an exclusive Mirror analysis of the latest price paid data from the Land Registry, homes in the E1W postcode area sold for an average of £803,316 each in the 12 months ending September,
This marks a drop of 13.11 percent from the year to August when homes in the area cost an average of £924,533, a staggering difference of £121,217.
It’s the largest percentage drop of any postcode area in England and Wales, where there were at least 50 houses sold in those 12 months.
The Cotswold town of Chipping Campden trails closely behind, where homes in the GL55 postcode area sold for an average of £649,112 in the year to September. This marks a 10.13 percent decrease in the year to August.
In the Hampshire village of Cliddesden, house prices in the RG25 postcode area fell by 7.37 percent on average, while in Ambleside, LA22, prices fell by 6.8 percent.
In S32, which covers the Derbyshire village of Calver, prices fell by 6.77 percent.
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However, when reducing the limit on the number of properties sold to 20 as opposed to 50, a different set of postcodes comes out as the worst for price drops.
Based off this, the TR5 postcode area, which covers St Agnes in Cornwall, has seen prices drop by more than a fifth in the last month.
The average home there cost £646,043 in the 12 months to the end of August 2023, but this dropped by 22 percent to £503,894 in the year ending September 2023.
SW1H, also known as Buckingham Gate, London, had the second largest percentage drop at 20.91 percent with homes there now costing an average of £2,415,697.
The average home in the Plymouth postcode area PL22 cost £404,091 in September, a drop of 15.09 percent from a month earlier. Meanwhile, in Doncaster, DN38, prices fell by 13.63 percent to an average of £195,648.
But some experts suggest the UK’s housing market is past “peak pain” and looks set to bottom out in mid-2024.
The latest five-year house price forecasts from property adviser, Savills, project average prices to fall by only three percent in 2024 as affordability pressures slowly ease, with the expectation that the Bank of England Base Rate will stand at 4.75 percent by the end of the year.
Less debt-dependent prime regional markets will be the first to recover, seeing falls of just 1.5 percent in 2024.
According to Savills, values held up slightly better than expected in 2023 as mortgage markets settled over the spring and autumn months.
Taking into account the current rate of falls, Savills has forecast that annual falls will stand at four percent by the end of the year, which will leave values down a total of seven percent from the autumn of 2022 to the end of 2023.
Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, commented: “Interest rates are expected to have peaked and the worst of the house prices falls look to be behind us, but the first cut to rates still looks to be some way off.
“This means continued affordability pressures are likely to result in further modest house price falls over the first half of 2024, resulting in a peak-to-trough house price adjustment in the order of -10 percent.
“The expectation of a gradual reduction in rates suggests a progressive restoration of buying power and steady recovery in demand. We expect growth to accelerate as affordability pressures ease, with the strongest growth forecast for 2027 when rates reach their long-term neutral level. From there, we expect growth to settle at a rate broadly in line with income growth.”
