No stranger to doom and gloom headlines, the recession has been hitting the UK housing market hard until just recently. According to the Halifax’s House Price Index, although house prices in July were 12.1% down on the same period in 2008, a more positive quarterly trend is emerging.

Rising 0.8% in the three months leading to July, house prices in the UK have enjoyed their first quarterly rise since October 2007. According to Halifax, this is seen as an indicator of an “underlying trend”, which confirms that the housing market is slowly recovering.

This will no doubt come as excellent news for homeowners and property developers, who will note the average cost for a house is now £159,623. Although this is some way off the £178,778 average in 2008 and nowhere near the highs of 2007, the quarterly rise up to July is indicative of changes. In fact, many will view these figures by Halifax as a sign that the housing market is improving. This is especially good news for homeowners who intend to sell up within the next couple of years or so. Indeed, many homeowners have outgrown their existing properties but find themselves unable to afford larger homes.

However, nobody said the road to recovery was easy. Indeed, the Halifax figures were published just a couple of days after research carried out by the National Housing Federation (NHF) concluded that house prices would, on average, plunge a further 12% by the end of 2009 and 4.6% in 2010. The NHF added that average house prices would not reach their 2007 peak until 2014, which ought to spell caution for anybody interpreting the Halifax’s recent results as a sign of a rapid recovery.

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