According to the Nationwide Building Society, house prices in the UK increased by 0.4%. This brought the annual rate of growth to 1.1% – the highest since Nov 2011.
Nationwide stated that this provided support to “the view that the housing market is gradually gaining momentum”. Robert Gardner, Nationwides’s chief economist indicated that a number of factors were likely to have lead to this including a reduction in the cost of credit and the UK returning to growth in the first period of 2013.
Mr Gardner said that property sales were also up, running at about 5% higher each month this year than the average monthly level in 2012