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Written by rosalind renshaw

Is the housing market picking up or not?

Is the Council of Mortgage Lenders right to be forecasting 900,000 transactions for last year when the Land Registry records give only 588,385 for the first 11 months?

Well, time will tell. But certainly the experts seem in a complete tizz, so maybe they should ask someone who really does know – an estate agent springs to mind.

Take Rightmove, whose shares have bounced sharply this week after first an upgrade from UBS which thinks the share price will hit £18, and now from Barclays, which is predicting £19.50.

The reason for the upgrades, according to the Daily Telegraph, reflects Rightmove’s performance as “the housing market picks up in 2013”.

Yet, in exactly the same Market Report column in the paper, we read that analysts have downgraded house builders such as Bellway, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt and Bovis, because analysts have “little visibility” about the market.

Comments

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    The 900,000 attributed to the Council of Mortgage Lenders will be for the whole of the UK. The figures from the Land Registry are for England & Wales only.

    I use that the HMRC numbers for the whole of the UK. Here's the link;- http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/statistics/transactions.htm

    • 25 January 2013 18:29 PM
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