The number of homes changing hands in Britain has fallen for the third month in a row in a worrying sign for the housing market.
There were 96,910 residential sales last month, according to Revenue & Customs, down 3.3 per cent from May and the first time this year that the number of house sales has fallen below 100,000 a month.
HRMC said that although transactions were up 1 per cent compared with last June, this was partly because sales last year were dampened by stamp duty land tax changes introduced in the budget.
Brian Murphy, head of lending for the Mortgage Advice Bureau, said the data provided definitive information and was therefore a reliable, independent gauge of the housing market.
He said: “Buyers can only purchase what is available on the market for sale and, as recent reports from other industry bodies, such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors suggest, homes for sale in many areas of the country are approaching record low numbers, which may as yet be reflected in the number of transactions completed in the next few months.”
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Ishaan Malhi, chief executive of Trussle, an online mortgage broker, said: “Buyers and sellers [may be] feeling slightly less confident about the future of the property market, unwilling to press ahead with purchases, perhaps due to the somewhat ominous political backdrop.”
• More Britons are feeling positive about the value of their homes, Knight Frank, said, with the upmarket estate agent’s house price sentiment index reaching 54.1 this month. Any figure over 50 indicates that prices are rising.