Herefordshire house prices sluggish despite inflation

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Thursday, 22 June 2023 08:04

By Gavin McEwan - Local Democracy Reporter

House prices in Herefordshire are not rising as fast as in the rest of the country, new official figures show.

The latest instalment of the Land Registry’s UK House Price Index, based on data from April but published only today (June 21) show that in Herefordshire, the average house price was £295,549, only a little under the average for England of £305,731.

But while house prices in England overall rose by 3.7 per cent in the year to April, they went up by just 1.6 per cent in Herefordshire.

This is the lowest national house price rise figure since September 2020, and stands in contrast to new official data on inflation also published today, which show overall price inflation stayed at 8.7 per cent in May.

Yet the affordability of homes in Herefordshire relative to local wages remains a problem. According to Herefordshire Council, last year the average price of the cheapest quarter of homes was still over nine times higher than the average of the lowest quarter of wages. The same figure for the West Midlands as a whole is seven times.

The latest HPI also shows a lower number of house sales in the February this year, the most recent month for which data is available, with 125 properties changing hands in Herefordshire compared to 155 in the previous February, mirroring a national fall in sales of 19 per cent over the same period.