Current price stats meaningless
A North Staffordshire estate agency is urging homeowners in the area to take some of the recent national house price statistics with a pinch of salt, branding them as meaningless in the run up to the election.
Heywoods of Newcastle-under-Lyme said that there had been a significant disparity in recent months between national price indices, such as those published by Halifax and Nationwide Building Society.
Not only did the results differ between the various surveys at any given time, it added, but the figures from any one particular source also varied significantly from month to month - particularly as the election looms large.
The company stressed that it currently only took a few high-value sales in a number of select locations to distort the figures and produce a misleading representation of house prices nationally.
And in an area such as Stoke-on-Trent where there had been only very modest house price movement, it concluded, homeowners could be led to think that prices were on their way up one week and on their way down in virtually the next.