"House prices fall by £20,000"

... was the original headline to this article in the Daily Mail, which originally just summarised the Halifax June House Price Index.

The revised headline is "House prices falling at fastest rate for 50 years - and interest rates won't be cut until 2009", and the author Becky Barrow has actually done a few minutes research, as evidenced by the first few sentences:

The price of the average home in Britain has plunged £17,000 since January, devastating figures revealed today. House prices are falling at a rate not witnessed since records began in the 1950s, according to the report from the banking giant Halifax. This suggests the current meltdown is even worse than the previous house price collapse in the 1990s.

So hopefully we'll see an end to the boring and misleading comments about 'worst house price falls since the 1990s' and start hearing phrases like '... in living memory' or '... since records began' or, for that matter, '... ever'.