Telegraph scaremongering: "Typical house price to lose a quarter of its value"

[muriel_volestrangler]

How to come up with a sensational headline to scare your (typically house-owning) readers: above is the headline the Torygraph chose; here's the sub-headline:

"The typical value of a home in Britain will lose a quarter of its value by the end of this year, dropping to just £150,000, economists have warned."

After that, you'd think that a 25% drop in house prices in one year has been forecast, wouldn't you? That's pretty major, and you'd wonder why it's not headline news elsewhere. Well, because no-one else had the balls to spin the story like that. The Telegraph continues:

Halifax, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, said average house prices dropped to £162,435 in November, down 1.3 per cent on the previous month and 1.6 per cent on the same period a year ago.

But economists forecast that values will drop even further this year to just £150,000 amid concerns about the economy.

It would mean a total drop of £50,000 in prices from the beginning of the credit crisis in August 2007, when they stood at £199,612.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/8250303/Typical-house-price-to-lose-a-quarter-of-its-value.html

So it's actually a forecast of a drop of 7.6% this year. But a drop of a quarter sounds so much more dramatic, so they take the peak price from three and a half years ago, and declare that a house's "value" that everything is a drop from.

Still, not all writers in the area take that attitude. Here's something different: House prices: why it's not all doom and gloom. That's in the Construction and Property section. Of the Telegraph. But you don't sell papers by scaring businessmen, only homeowners.