is there a boom in the uk housing market?
Thirteen years ago the unsustainable housing boom of the late 1980s came to a sudden and dramatic end! During the early 1990s the UK housing sector endured a deep recession that cost thousands of jobs and left over 1.6 million home-owners with mortgages worth more than the market value of their properties. More recently we have seen renewed interest in the cyclical strength of the UK housing market. In 1999 and into the first half of 2000 there was a clear acceleration in house prices in many (but not all) regions of the country. House price inflation picked up to over 15% by the early summer of 2000 before beginning to soften as higher interest rates and increased taxes on house purchase started to have their effect on the market. House price inflation continued to edge downwards in the spring of 2001 before the market showed renewed strength in the summer of 2001. What causes house prices to rise? Prices rise through a combination of factors on both the supply and demand side of the
