Home Buying Guide
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Understanding House Price Indices / Indexes - What Can You Really Learn From Them?

Hardly a day goes by when house prices aren't in the news.

Whether they are rising, falling or not changing at all, there seems to be an unlimited supply of 'facts' about house prices.

Sometimes, it's hard to tell what to believe or what it means to you. In this guide, we'll explain how house price indices work and how they can help you.

What Are House Price Indices?

Why are they all different?

Who produces the house price indexes

How Are House Price Indices Useful To Me?

Where Can I Get House Price Indices?

What Are House Price Indices?

A house price index is a collection of key statistics that tracks the movement of house prices. These usually cover either England and Wales or the whole of the UK, depending on the organisation running the index.

In principle, house price indices are a great idea.

Month by month, people can monitor what's happening to the property market - average prices, how long properties take to sell and so on.

The UK housing market has several major house price indices, each of which provides a monthly report on the housing market. The only problem is that they usually disagree with each other…

Let's take a look at the key figures for February 2008, for example:

Organisation	Monthly Change	Annual Change	Average House Price
Halifax	-0.4%	4.2%	£196,465
Nationwide	-0.5%	2.7%	£179,358
Land Registry	0%	5.3%	£185,616
Rightmove	3.2%	5.8%	£237,856

See what I mean?

Who are you supposed to believe?

The reality is that these statistics are all 'true' - but they are all calculated in different ways using different information.

Read on to learn how and why they are different and to see what each index tells you.

Why is each price index different?

Who produces the house price indexes

How Are House Price Indices Useful To Me?

Where Can I Get House Price Indices?

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