UK house price growth fell to 0.5% in October. Will November avoid a yearly fall?
Nationwide says UK house prices rose 0.5% in the year to October, the slowest rise since January 2024. Its November figure is due around 1 December.
What happened
UK annual house price growth softened to 0.5% in October, the slowest pace since , with the average home at £273,566.
UK house prices rose 0.5% in the year to October. Nationwide said on that this is the slowest rise since , down from 0.8% in September and 1.6% in August. The average home cost £273,566, against £274,251 in September. Once Nationwide takes out the usual changes for the time of year, prices were flat in October and fell 0.3% in September.
Robert Gardner, chief economist at Nationwide, said “new buyer enquiries remain weak”. He added that people felt less confident in October about the economy and their own money. The average five-year fixed mortgage cost 5.99% on , according to Moneyfacts, close to 6% for the first time in three years.
The Bank of England kept its interest rate at 3.75% in September, but three of its nine members voted for 4%. It decides again on , and The Guardian reports growing expectations of the first rise in three years. Nationwide’s figure for November is expected around .
UK annual house price growth softened to 0.5% in October, the slowest pace since
Nationwide House Price Index,
Sources: Nationwide (2, 3), The Guardian, Bank of England (2)
The Pattern
We looked for cases where yearly growth in Nationwide’s UK house price index fell two months in a row and landed between zero and 1%. Nationwide’s monthly figures start in 1991. We found seven such months, from 2010 to 2025, and checked whether the next month showed prices lower than a year before.
Show the other 5 cases
The Read
The past leans towards no yearly fall, but this November starts from a weaker place. For a fall, the average price in November must drop below about £272,861, about 0.26% under October before the usual changes for the time of year are taken out. Prices fell that much from October to November in five of the last 16 years. From May to prices were the weakest for those months since 2010, and in September lenders approved 53,400 home loans, against about 58,800 a month in the six months before.
There are reasons for doubt. All seven months come from Nationwide’s own figures, two of them from the same slowdown of 2010 and three from 2019. Nationwide also changes old figures later. As first printed, was 0.4%, the same as November, and none of the six months left was followed by a fall. In 2010 one Bank of England member voted for a rise, as three did in , but the rate was 0.5% then and is 3.75% now. Tom Bill of the estate agent Knight Frank says a Budget without big shocks “may produce a modest relief bounce in coming months”.
Sources: Nationwide (2), Bank of England (2, 3), The Guardian (2)
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