Twindig housing Market Index (HMI) - 1 Oct 2022

Well, it has certainly not been a dull week for the UK housing market... It is fair to say that the markets did not react well to Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget. The impact on the housing market has been huge, as banks and building societies rushed to take mortgage products off the shelves in the face of such interest rate uncertainty. Housebuilders' shares tumbled as investors feared that housing transactions would stall, and the house price doomsayers relished every opportunity they had to get on their housing market soap boxes.

If there was any doubt about what housing market investors thought about last week's mini-budget, the Twindig Housing Market Index sums it up very clearly and concisely, it fell by 11.5% this week to 61.6. To up that into context, this was the biggest fall since 20 March 2020 (the start of Lockdown 1) taking the Twindig Housing Market Index to its lowest level since 22 May 2022. At that time we were in lockdown, in the first wave of a global pandemic and we had no vaccine. Now we are unlocked, we have vaccines, but are in the first wave (or term) of the Kwasi / Truss Government. 

However, in a week of uncertainty, punctuated with speculation, we did have some concrete data points. Yes, the data refers to before the mini-budget, but it is still helpful to know where the housing market was just before the budget bombshell was dropped. Mortgage approvals leapt 17% in August and annual house price inflation in September was 9.5%. All was well before the Kwasi (or is that the 'quasi' budget...)