The latest news from our city tracker shows that although Hometrack and the Land Registry are seeing different levels of property price growth, there is now a close match between the cities that are seeing good price growth and those that are hardly seeing any growth at all – or slight falls.

Belfast, Bradford, and Newcastle upon Tyne all show good house price growth year on year. The Land Registry data shows higher rates of growth than Hometrack, but this is likely partly because Hometrack adjusted its index to take into account the fact that more houses were being sold than flats during the pandemic, and partly because the information is more up to date, so its likely that the Zoopla rises more accurately reflect what’s happening currently.

And for those cities that are showing little growth, Hometrack and Land Registry agree that Peterborough and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole are seeing the lowest growth, but differ when it comes to other lowest performers with Gloucester, London and Tunbridge Wells struggling according to the Land Registry and Aberdeen, Brighton and Hove and Portsmouth seeing little growth from Zoopla’s report.

From a city perspective, we can also see that some still haven’t seen property prices recover to their levels in 2022, prior to mortgage rates rising rapidly. This is despite all the extra activity driven by the end of the SDLT temporary reduction.

These cities, in particular, can be considered good value for money, especially as buyer demand is predicted to rise towards the end of the year if the Bank Base Rate continues to fall. With good levels of stock available and accessibility to sub 4% mortgage rates again, this is a great time to suggest to would-be buyers that now is a good time to at least start looking for property again, especially if buyers haven’t been looking for a few years.

Appendix: City/town property indices price tracking

For city/town tracking, we use Land Registry (government data) and Zoopla/Hometrack. The Land Registry data is useful because we can analyse how property prices have changed over time and this helps us to put today’s price information into context.

The Zoopla/Hometrack data is useful as they take into account the change in mix of property transactions during the pandemic to houses away from flats. This has meant the likes of the Land Registry and other indices have over exaggerated price changes year on year.