Estate Agents

If you really want to know what is happening to house prices then ask an estate agent. That’s what they will tell you anyway – and now whole groups of them have put together price indices of their own. The two best known come from Rightmove and Hometrack with the former looking at some 200,000 asking prices a month which it says cover eight in 10 of all homes on sale at any one time. Its research also includes details on the average length of time that a home has been on the market – again a useful extra tool if you are making predictions for future trends. Hometrack surveys thousands of estate agents when it works out its price figures – and like all the others it reckons it is the most accurate in the country.