Official: House price crash over!

Well, according to The Halifax (part of HBOS, part of Lloyds Banking Group etc) it is:

"There was a 1.9% increase in average UK house prices in January, offsetting December's 1.6% decline. Prices in the three months to January compared to the preceding three months, which provides a better indicator of the underlying trend, were 5.1% lower."

As I said over at HPC:

For several months now, the Halifax timed their press release to come out just as the MPC were making their final deliberations on base rate changes, presumably in the vague hope of stampeding them into a rate cut, which appears to have worked 'well' so far.

But has the strategy worked 'too well'???

Presumably, LloydsHBOS are now suffering from all the tracker mortgages they doled out at base rate plus/minus nothing and have decided to go on the other tack, and to make sure that the MPC don't cut rates this time. Hence the earlier-than-normal-release and the highly dubious assertion that prices have gone up.

I'm not impressed, not impressed at all.