"The average UK house price" is becoming one of the least useful numbers in this industry, and it is worth being precise about why.
It is not that the number is wrong. It is that it now averages things which have stopped moving together.
Inside a single recent quarter: detached asking prices up on the year, while flats in some regions were down on the year. Average time to agree a sale ranging from 55 days for a semi to 77 for a flat. The share of listings under offer within ninety days ranging from 27.7% for flats to 47.2% for semis.
Those are not variations around a national figure. They are different markets that happen to be measured together.
What sits underneath is financing and liability rather than bricks. A semi in a commuter town is bought by someone with a mortgage offer and a straightforward title. A flat carries a lease, a service charge, a freeholder and a building somebody else controls, and it is bought by a narrower pool with more that can go wrong. Detached sits at a price point where the buyer usually has to sell something first.
Each has its own binding constraint, and constraints do not move in step. When they diverge, the average stops describing any of them.
The practical version, for anyone planning off market data: a national average now tells you almost nothing about what will happen to a specific property. If your business is weighted towards one type, it misleads you in both directions. Too optimistic when your segment is struggling, too gloomy when it is fine.
This is not an argument against measuring. It is an argument against measuring at the wrong resolution, which is a more common mistake and a harder one to notice, because the number still looks like a number.
Work out which market you are actually in, and measure that one.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
