Planning to Buy a House? You Should Wait!

Graham Beale, the CEO of Nationwide Building Society believes that housing prices will continue to hit new lows during 2008-09 and possibly in 2010 too.  He expects property prices to fall to around 25% of the highs which they hit in 2007. I think that there is now a general consensus now that this will indeed happen. His comments were accompanied with the report stating that their net new mortgage lending had fallen by over two-thirds. In the last 6 months (to September) Nationwide’s lending for new mortgages amounted to £1 billion, compared with £3.6 billion a year earlier. The only real good news to come out from their announcement was that only 0.4% of its residential mortgage customers were three months or more in arrears, which is well below the national average of 1.33%.