UK House Prices Fall On Yr 1st Time Since 06

U.K. house prices posted their first annual decline in more than two years in April as economic uncertainty and the global credit crisis further reduced activity in the residential property market, housing valuation company Hometrack said Monday.

House prices fell an average 0.6% in April, the seventh consecutive monthly fall, after dipping 0.2% in March, it said. On the year, prices fell 0.9% after rising 0.4% in March, the first drop since February 2006 and the weakest performance since they slumped 1.0% in January 2006.

"While the availability of finance is impacting on demand in certain segments, the reality is that weak confidence is effectively resulting in a buyers strike with households sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see how events unfold," Hometrack Director of Research Richard Donnell said in a statement.

The experts views on mortgages and the housing market

The average asking price for a home in the UK is now £239,521, just 1.3 per cent higher than a year ago, according to Rightmove, the property website.

Rightmove says that asking prices have dropped 0.1 per cent in the past month, a sharp contrast to average increases of 2.8 per cent recorded each April since 2002.

House prices across the Bidwells region - Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and North Essex - fell 3.8 per cent on average.

Vacant Homes in U.K. Prove Speculator Nightmare

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Lee spent 5.3 million pounds ($10 million) buying 20 rental homes across the U.K. with just 150,000 pounds of his own money. Today, the properties are worth about 60 percent less and owned by the banks that financed the purchases.

Lee was one of thousands enticed by one of Europe's top five best-performing residential property markets during the past decade. Now repossessions are mounting and properties stand empty as many investors fail to find the tenants needed to cover their mortgages after a building boom flooded cities, especially Leeds and Manchester, with apartments.

The unraveling buy-to-rent investment market contributed to a 2.5 percent drop in home prices last month, the biggest since 1992, a report by mortgage lender HBOS Plc shows.

At least 4,000 U.K. real-estate agents may shut their doors

At least 4,000 U.K. real-estate agents from the 12,000 estimated to be in business may shut their doors by next year because of the collapse of the real- estate market, the London-based Times reported, citing Robin King, a director of real-estate agent network Movewithus.

The network's sales have dropped between 30 percent and 50 percent since last year, the newspaper said.

The Property Shop, an east England-based real estate agency, shut nine of its 10 offices and dismissed about 30 employees in April, just before its parent company, Alexander Partnership, went into administration, the newspaper said.