According to the Halifax house price index, house prices fell in the UK in the three months to April. This is the first quarterly fall since 2012. The Nationwide index (see below), shows that prices in April were 0.4% lower than in March (although the 3-month rate was still slightly positive).
The fall in house prices reflects a cooling in demand. This, in turn, reflects a squeeze on household incomes as price rises begin to overtake wage rises. It also reflects buyers becoming more cautious given the uncertainty over the nature of the Brexit deal and its effects on the economy and people’s incomes.
The fall in demand is also driven by recent Bank of England rules which require mortgage lenders to limit the proportion of mortgages with a mortgage/income ratio of 4.5 or above to no more than 15% of their new mortgages. It is also affected by a rise in stamp duty, especially on buy-to-let properties.
Despite the fall in prices, this may understate the fall in demand relative to supply. House price movements often lag behind changes in demand and supply as people are reluctant to adjust to equilibrium prices. In the case of a falling market, sellers may be unwilling to sell at the lower equilibrium price, believing that a lower price ‘undervalues’ their property. Indeed, they may not even put their houses on the market. This makes prices ‘sticky’ downwards. The result is a fall in sales.
Eventually, such people will reluctantly be prepared to accept a lower price and prices will thus fall more. Once people come to expect price falls, supply may increase further as vendors seek to sell before the price falls even more. So we could well see further falls over the coming months.
Lower house prices and falling sales is a picture repeated in many parts of the UK. It is particularly marked in central London. There, estate agents have begun to offer free gifts to purchasers. As The Guardian puts it:
London estate agents have begun to offer free cars worth £18,000, stamp duty subsidies of £150,000, plus free iPads and Sonos sound systems to kickstart sales in the capital’s increasingly moribund property market. The once super-hot central London market has turned into a ‘burnt-out core’ according to buying agents Garrington Property Finders, prompting developers to offer ever greater incentives to lure buyers.
… Land Registry figures show that in the heart of the city’s financial district, average property prices plummeted from £861,000 at the time of the EU referendum to £773,000 in February, a decline of 15%, although in London’s outer boroughs prices are still up over the year.
But lower property prices are good news for first-time buyers, although some of the biggest falls have been in the top end of the market.
The fall in property prices may continue for a few months. But population is rising, and with it the number of people who would like to buy their own home. Once real incomes begin to rise again, therefore, demand is likely to resume rising faster than supply. When it does, house prices will continue their upward trend.
Articles
UK house prices in first quarterly fall since 2012 BBC News (8/5/17)
UK house prices fall again in April as buyers feel the pinch The Guardian, Angela Monaghan (28/4/17)
Buy a home, get a car free: offers galore as London estate agents struggle to sell The Guardian, Patrick Collinson (3/5/17)
London is now one of the five cities with the lowest house price growth in the UK City A.M., Helen Cahill (28/4/17)
London Housing Market Property Bubble Vulnerable To Crash The Market Oracle, Jan Skoyles (3/5/17)
A key indicator of a healthy housing market is flashing red in London Business Insider, Thomas Colson (29/5/17)
House Price Data
UK House Prices – links to various sites Economic Data freely available online – Economics Network
Questions
- Why are UK house prices falling?
- What determines the rate at which they are falling? How is the price elasticity of demand and/or supply relevant here?
- How does speculation help to explain changes in house prices? How may speculation help to (a) stabilise and (b) destabilise house prices?
- Draw a demand and supply diagram to show how house transactions will be lower if the market is not in equailibrium.
- Why are house prices falling faster in central London than elsewhere in the UK?
- Why are rents falling in central London? How does this relate to the fall in central London property prices?
- How has the Help to Buy scheme affected house prices? Has it affected both demand and supply and, if so, why and how?
- How do changes in residential property transaction volumes relate to changes in property prices?
- What market imperfections exist in the housing market?
The term ‘Google it’ is now part of everyday language. If there is ever something you don’t know, the quickest, easiest, most cost-effective and often the best way to find the answer is to go to Google. While there are many other search engines that provide similar functions and similar results, Google was revolutionary as a search engine and as a business model.
This article by Tim Harford, writing for BBC News, looks at the development of Google as a business and as a search engine. One of the reasons why Google is so effective for individuals and businesses is the speed with which information can be obtained. It is therefore used extensively to search key terms and this is one of the ways Google was able to raise advertising revenue. The business model developed to raise finance has therefore been a contributing factor to the decline in newspaper advertising revenue.
Google began the revolution in terms of search of engines and, while others do exist, Google is a classic example of a dominant firm and that raises certain problems. The article looks at many aspects of Google.
Just google it: The student project that changed the world BBC News, Tim Harford (27/03/17)
Questions
- Is Google a natural monopoly? What are the characteristics of a natural monopoly and how does this differ from a monopoly?
- Are there barriers to entry in the market in which Google operates?
- What are the key determinants of demand for Google from businesses and individuals?
- Why do companies want to advertise via Google? How might the reasons differ from advertising in newspapers?
- Why has there been a decline in advertising in newspapers? How do you think this has affected newspapers’ revenue and profits?
The UK Parliament’s Culture Media and Sport Select Committee has been examining the secondary ticketing market. The secondary market for events is dominated by four agencies – viagogo, eBay-owned StubHub and Ticket-master’s Get Me In! and Seatwave. These buy tickets to events in the primary market (i.e. from the events or their agents) and then resell them, normally at considerably inflated prices to people unable to get tickets in the primary market.
One example has grabbed the headlines recently. This is where viagogo was advertising tickets for an Ed Sheeran charity concert for £5000. The original tickets were sold for between £40 and £110, with the money going to the Teenage Cancer Trust. None of viagogo’s profits would go to the charity. The tickets were marked ‘not for resale’; so there was doubt that anyone buying a ticket from viagogo would even be able to get into the concert!
There are four major issues.
The first is that the tickets are often sold, as in the case of the Ed Sheeran concert, at many times their face value. We examined this issue back in September 2016 in the blog What the market will bear? Secondary markets and ticket touts).
The second is that the secondary sites use ‘bots’ to buy tickets in bulk when they first come on sale. This makes it much harder for customers to buy tickets on the primary site. Often all the tickets are sold within seconds of coming on sale.
The third is whether the tickets sold on the secondary market are legitimate. Some, like the Ed Sheeran tickets, are marked ‘not for resale’; some are paperless and yet the secondary ticket agencies are accused of selling paper versions, which are worthless.
The fourth is that multiple seats that are listed together are not always located together and so people attending with friends or partners may be forced to sit separately.
These are the issues that were addressed by the Culture Media and Sport committee at its meeting on 21 March. It was due to take evidence from various people, including viagogo, the agency which has come in for the most criticism. Viagogo, however, decided not to attend. This has drawn withering criticism from the press and on social media. One of the other witnesses at the meeting, Keith Kenny, sales and ticketing director for the West End musical Hamilton, described viagogo as ‘a blot on the landscape’. He said, ‘Ultimately, our terms and conditions say ticket reselling is forbidden. If you look at the way that glossy, sneaky site is constructed, they’ve gone an awful long way not to be compliant in the way they’ve built their site.’
The Competition and Markets Authority launched an enforcement investigation last December into suspected breaches of consumer protection law in the online secondary tickets market. This follows on from an earlier report for the government by an independent review chaired by Professor Waterson.
The government itself is considering amending the Digital Economy Bill to make it illegal to use bots to buy tickets in excess of the limit set by the event. Online touts who break this new law would face unlimited fines.
Articles
Touts to face unlimited fines for bulk-buying tickets online Independent, Roisin O’Connor (13/3/17)
Unlimited fines for bulk buying ticket touts BBC News (11/3/17)
Ticket touts face unlimited fines for using ‘bots’ to buy in bulk The Guardian, Rob Davies (10/3/17)
Ticket touts face unlimited fines in government crackdown on bots Music Week, James Hanley (11/3/17)
Government confirms bots ban and better enforcement in response to secondary ticketing review CMU, Chris Cooke (13/3/17)
The ‘Viagogo Glitch’: Why Fans Must Be Put First In The Secondary Ticketing Market Huffington Post, Sharon Hodgson (14/3/17)
Angry MPs accuse no-show Viagogo of ‘fraudulent mis-selling’ of Ed Sheeran tickets i News, Adam Sherwin (21/3/17)
Ed Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp on secondary ticketing BBC News, Stuart Camp (21/3/17)
Fury at Viagogo no-show as MPs probe tickets on sale for thousands Coventry Telegraph, James Rodger (22/3/17)
Music fans given 10-step guide on how to tackle ticket touts Daily Record, Mark McGivern (20/3/17)
Viagogo snubs MPs’ inquiry into online ticket reselling The Guardian, Rob Davies (21/3/17)
Viagogo a No-Show at U.K. Hearing Into Secondary Ticketing: ‘Huge Lack of Respect’ Billboard, Richard Smirke (21/3/17)
Daily Record campaign against ticket touts reaches Parliament but Viagogo don’t show up to answer claims Daily Record, Torcuil Crichton and Keith McLeod (22/3/17)
Ticketmaster is using its software — and your data — to take on ticket-buying bots recode, Peter Kafka (14/3/17)
Official sites and documents
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee holds a further evidence session on ticket abuse. Culture, Media and Sport Commons Select Committee (20/3/17)
CMA launches enforcement investigation into online secondary ticketing Competition and Markets Authority, Press Release (19/12/16)
Independent Review of Consumer Protection Measures concerning Online Secondary Ticketing Facilities Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Professor Michael Waterson (May 2016)
Ticket abuse: ban digital ‘harvesting’ software says Committee Culture, Media and Sport Commons Select Committee (24/11/16)
Questions
- Use a demand and supply diagram to demonstrate how secondary ticket agencies are able to sell tickets for popular events at prices several times the tickets’ face value.
- If secondary ticket sites and ticket touts are able to sell tickets at well above box office prices, isn’t this simply a reflection of people’s willingness to pay (i.e. their marginal utility)? In which case, aren’t these sellers providing a useful service?
- How do secondary ticket agencies reduce consumer surplus? Could they reduce it to zero?
- See Tickets, the primary market ticket agency, has set up a secondary site, whereby fans can trade tickets with one another at a mark-up capped at just 5%. Will this help to reduce abuses on the secondary market, or is it a totally separate part of the market?
- Would it be a good idea for event organisers to charge higher prices for popular events than they do at present, but still below the equilibrium?
- How does the price elasticity of demand influence the mark-up that secondary ticket agencies can make? Illustrate this on a diagram similar to the one in question 1.
- What measures would you advocate to make tickets more available to the public at reasonable prices? Explain their benefits and any drawbacks.
- What would be the effect on prices if the use of bots could be successfully banned?
Both the financial and goods markets are heavily influenced by sentiment. And such sentiment tends to be self-reinforcing. If consumers and investors are pessimistic, they will not spend and not invest. The economy declines and this further worsens sentiment and further discourages consumption and investment. Banks become less willing to lend and stock markets fall. The falling stock markets discourage people from buying shares and so share prices fall further. The despondency becomes irrational and greatly exaggerates economic fundamentals.
This same irrationality applies in a boom. Here it becomes irrational exuberance. A boom encourages confidence and stimulates consumer spending and investment. This further stimulates the boom via the multiplier and accelerator and further inspires confidence. Banks are more willing to lend, which further feeds the expansion. Stock markets soar and destabilising speculation further pushes up share prices. There is a stock market bubble.
But bubbles burst. The question is whether the current global stock market boom, with share prices reaching record levels, represents a bubble. One indicator is the price/earnings (PE) ratio of shares. This is the ratio of share prices to earnings per share. Currently the ratio for the US index, S&P 500, is just over 26. This compares with a mean over the past 147 years of 15.64. The current ratio is the third highest after the peaks of the early 2000s and 2008/9.
An alternative measure of the PE ratio is the Shiller PE ratio (see also). This is named after Robert Shiller, who wrote the book Irrational Exuberance. Unlike conventional PE ratios, which only look at average earnings over the past four quarters, the Shiller PE ratio uses average earnings over the past 10 years. “Because this factors in earnings from the previous ten years, it is less prone to wild swings in any one year.”
The current level of the Shiller PE ratio is 29.14, the third highest on record, this time after the period running up to the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. The mean Shiller PE ratio over the past 147 years is 16.72.
So are we in a period of irrational exuberance? And are stock markets experiencing a bubble that sooner or later will burst? The following articles explore these questions.
Articles
2 Clear Instances of Irrational Exuberance Seeking Alpha, Jeffrey Himelson (12/2/17)
Promised land of Trumpflation-inspired global stimulus has been slow off the mark South China Morning Post, David Brown (20/2/17)
A stock market crash is a way off, but this boom will turn to bust The Guardian, Larry Elliott (16/2/17)
The “boring” bubble is close to bursting – the Unilever bid proves it MoneyWeek, John Stepek (20/2/17)
Questions
- Find out what is meant by Minksy’s ‘financial instability hypothesis’ and a ‘Minsky moment’. How might they explain irrational exuberance and the sudden turning point from a boom to a bust?
- Is it really irrational to buy shares with a very high PE ratio if everyone else is doing so?
- Why are people currently exuberant?
- What might cause the current exuberance to end?
- How does irrational exuberance affect the size of the multiplier?
- How might the behaviour of banks and other financial institutions contribute towards a boom fuelled by irrational exuberance?
- Compare the usefulness of a standard PE ratio with the Shiller PE ratio.
- Other than high PE ratios, what else might suggest that stock markets are overvalued?
- Why might a company’s PE ratio differ from its price/dividends ratio (see)? Which is a better measure of whether or not a share is overvalued?
The economic climate remains uncertain and, as we enter 2017, we look towards a new President in the USA, challenging negotiations in the EU and continuing troubles for High Street stores. One such example is Next, a High Street retailer that has recently seen a significant fall in share price.
Prices of clothing and footwear increased in December for the first time in two years, according to the British Retail Consortium, and Next is just one company that will suffer from these pressures. This retail chain is well established, with over 500 stores in the UK and Eire. It has embraced the internet, launching its online shopping in 1999 and it trades with customers in over 70 countries. However, despite all of the positive actions, Next has seen its share price fall by nearly 12% and is forecasting profits in 2017 to be hit, with a lack of growth in earnings reducing consumer spending and thus hitting sales.
The sales trends for Next are reminiscent of many other stores, with in-store sales falling and online sales rising. In the days leading up to Christmas, in-store sales fell by 3.5%, while online sales increased by over 5%. However, this is not the only trend that this latest data suggests. It also indicates that consumer spending on clothing and footwear is falling, with consumers instead spending more money on technology and other forms of entertainment. Kirsty McGregor from Drapers magazine said:
“I think what we’re seeing there is an underlying move away from spending so much money on clothing and footwear. People seem to be spending more money on going out and on technology, things like that.”
Furthermore, with price inflation expected to rise in 2017, and possibly above wage inflation, spending power is likely to be hit and it is spending on those more luxury items that will be cut. With Next’s share price falling, the retail sector overall was also hit, with other companies seeing their share prices fall as well, although some, such as B&M, bucked the trend. However, the problems facing Next are similar to those facing other stores.
But for Next there is more bad news. It appears that the retail chain has simply been underperforming for some time. We have seen other stores facing similar issues, such as BHS and Marks & Spencer. Neil Wilson from ETX Capital said:
“The simple problem is that Next is underperforming the market … UK retail sales have held up in the months following the Brexit vote but Next has suffered. It’s been suffering for a while and needs a turnaround plan … The brand is struggling for relevancy, and risks going the way of Marks & Spencer on the clothing front, appealing to an ever-narrower customer base.”
Brand identity and targeting customers are becoming ever more important in a highly competitive High Street that is facing growing competition from online traders. Next is not the first company to suffer from this and will certainly not be the last as we enter what many see as one of the most economically uncertain years since the financial crisis.
Next’s gloomy 2017 forecast drags down fashion retail shares The Guardian, Sarah Butler and Julia Kollewe (4/1/17)
Next shares plummet after ‘difficult’ Christmas trading The Telegraph, Sam Dean (4/1/17)
Next warns 2017 profits could fall up to 14% as costs grow Sky News, James Sillars (4/1/17)
Next warns on outlook as sales fall BBC News (4/1/17)
Next chills clothing sector with cut to profit forecast Reuters, James Davey (4/1/17)
Next shares drop after warning of difficult winter Financial Times, Mark Vandevelde (22/10/15)
Questions
- With Next’s warning of a difficult winter, its share price fell. Using a diagram, explain why this happened.
- Why have shares in other retail companies also been affected following Next’s report on its profit forecast for 2017?
- Which factors have adversely affected Next’s performance over the past year? Are they the same as the factors that have affected Marks & Spencer?
- Next has seen a fall in profits. What is likely to have caused this?
- How competitive is the UK High Street? What type of market structure would you say that it fits into?
- With rising inflation expected, what will this mean for consumer spending? How might this affect economic growth?
- One of the factors affecting Next is higher import prices. Why have import prices increased and what will this mean for consumer spending and sales?
According to the Halifax house price index, house prices fell in the UK in the three months to April. This is the first quarterly fall since 2012. The Nationwide index (see below), shows that prices in April were 0.4% lower than in March (although the 3-month rate was still slightly positive).
Lower house prices and falling sales is a picture repeated in many parts of the UK. It is particularly marked in central London. There, estate agents have begun to offer free gifts to purchasers. As The Guardian puts it:
