Propertysnake.co.uk

Call it weltschmertz, call it morbid curiosity, but the propertysnake.co.uk website is horribly fascinating for us observers of the UK property market. Like watching a car crash in slow motion one knows one should turn away … but the eyes are irresistibly drawn back. The site does one thing only - charts individual price falls on properties in your (and every other) area of the UK. Prices are given, then percentage falls, then the stages of price fall (£50,000 in May another £30,000 in June and so on), with the highest percentage fallers at the top (currently there are properties nudging 50% falls). You can sort by biggest fall, area, most expensive to cheapest and so on.

Propertysnake is a staggeringly simple website, with a great deal of computing power behind it, and is made possible by the powerful database accessing abilities and fast data transfer speeds of the modern internet. It’s also made possible by the critical mass of properties on the agents’ sites these days (and also on the aggregated sites, such as rightmove.co.uk and findaproperty.co.uk). Propertysnake can hit those sites and, courtesy of the database, spot changes, calculate and rank. Unsurprisingly, it’s not proved a big hit with estate agents, and Propertysnake has been threatened with legal action, which is why many of the properties onsite no longer have photos. But for getting the ‘feel’ of price movements in an area, it’s unbeatable. Also note that Propertysnake lists changes in asking prices, not prices achieved. For that you’ll have to go to the Land Registry Figures.

For those optimists calling the bottom of this particular asset price slide, we’d caution there’s a lot more pain yet. I spoke to an estate agent this week who, yet again, told me this ‘credit crunch thing’ was nonsense dreamed up by pessimist journalists. If I were a fortune teller, I might point out that the stock markets generally give a good six month lead on the financial health of the economy - with the FTSE 100 dropping below 5300 on 11 July, to its lowest close in nearly three years, I’d guess that there’s more pain to come for the economy, and thus the UK housing market. Keep watching that propertysnake!

Tag: Propertysnake.co.uk, credit crunch, UK house prices