The first official post-Brexit figures to be released showed that annual house price growth in the U.K. slowed in July, although it’s still close to double digits.
House prices in the U.K., on average, rose 8.3% from July 2015 to July 2016 to stand at £216,750 ($285,861), according to the Land Registry, a government body whose numbers are based on sales.
However, while this was down from the 9.7% annual increase in June, it was still the third highest rate recorded this year. Meanwhile, prices edged up 0.4% between June and July as demand outpaced supply across the country.
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In London, price growth was close to double the national average at 12.3%, pushing the average price of a property to £484,716 ($639,583), although this has cooled from a peak of 20% price growth in May 2014.
The Land Registry’s figures also showed that home sales fell by 0.9% in July compared to the previous month, which means that on a monthly basis, they remain below levels seen in 2014 and 2015 and before the latest stamp duty changes in early 2016.
"This suggests that market demand remained relatively resilient after the Brexit vote, despite some slowdown in mortgage lending," Thomas Fisher, an economist at PwC, said. "However, as many of these transactions will have been in motion since before the referendum, more data will be needed to make a proper assessment of how the referendum result is affecting the housing market."
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He continued: "Our own expectation is that the U.K. housing market will cool, not crash. In our main scenario, average U.K. house price growth is projected to decelerate to around 5% in 2016 and around 1% in 2017."