The Nationwide figures for December are worth a look if you haven’t already seen them. Prices down 0.4% on the month, annual growth crawling at 0.6%, average price £271,068. The regional breakdown is where it gets interesting though. North West up 3.5% annually, East Anglia the only region actually in negative territory at minus 0.8%.
Locally I am seeing something that roughly matches this. The New Forest has always been a bit of an outlier but even here things feel sluggish. Two houses on my road have been sitting since before Christmas with no movement, and an end-of-terrace on the main road just had a £15k reduction which brings it in line with what it sold for in 2022. Progress of a sort.
I am curious whether the new planning rules, the NPPF stuff that came through in December, will actually feed through to supply in the south or whether it is all just words on paper for now. The “default yes” around railway stations sounds great in principle but the station nearest me is surrounded by protected land so I suspect the answer there is still no 
Anyone else noticing the north doing better than the south in their patch?
@greenwhistle_hants, the planning stuff is window dressing until they actually start building, which they won’t, because the problem has never been the rules on paper but the combination of local opposition, viability assessments that magically prove nothing is profitable, and councils that have lost half their planning officers to consultancies paying twice the salary. I have watched three separate sites near me in the south east go through “consultation” for years and end up as either a car wash or a slightly larger car park. The NPPF rewrite will make for some nice speeches and then absolutely nothing will change on the ground for at least five years, by which point there will be another rewrite. The north south split is real though and has been widening for a while. Sitting on cash in the south feels increasingly like watching a slow puncture, while people in Manchester and Liverpool are apparently having a lovely time. I am not quite ready to relocate my savings account to Salford but give it another year of this and I might reconsider.
North West doing well is no comfort when you’re sat in the East Midlands watching the same house on the corner go nowhere for months. Annual growth of 0.6% nationally is basically standing still once you account for inflation. That empty place near me still has the same board up, slightly more crooked now after the wind on New Year’s Eve.
@halfpenny_doris, don’t assume the south is doing any better just because it doesn’t show up as a negative number. Down here prices are technically positive but nothing is moving at asking. The agents are all smiles in January but half those Christmas listings will still be there at Easter with quiet price cuts. The north/south split is less about who is winning and more about who is losing more slowly
The thing that always gets me about the regional breakdown is how useless it is once you zoom in past the headline. North West up 3.5% sounds like a party until you realise that is being dragged up by a handful of postcodes around Manchester where everything sells in a week, while half of Merseyside is doing nothing at all. Same in reverse down south, East Anglia is the only region showing a negative but I guarantee there are streets in Cambridge where prices have gone up 5% while some village in Norfolk is quietly rotting. The national average of 0.6% is particularly meaningless, it is the property market equivalent of saying the average person has one breast and one testicle. I keep checking these numbers every month as if one day they will suddenly tell me something actionable, and they never do.
Saw something this week saying asking prices jumped nearly 3% in January, biggest on record for the month apparently. Round here that just means the same houses that sat there all autumn have been relisted with a fresh price and a new photo of the front door. The one on my road is back up again, £5k more than it was in October. Nobody is viewing it. Record January bounce my foot.
@halfpenny_doris, I have noticed the exact same thing down here. Three properties near me that were listed in September have vanished from Rightmove over Christmas and reappeared under a different agent with marginally different photos and a round-number price. I suppose technically that counts as a new listing, which feeds into the stat about the number of homes for sale being 6% higher than last year. More homes for sale and fewer actually selling is not exactly a boom, is it