House prices are forecast to rise faster in Northern Ireland over the next four years than anywhere else in the UK , a new report suggests.
PwC’s latest UK Economic Outlook predicts that house prices in the North could rise by up to 4 per cent, boosting the average price of a home, currently around £128,000, to £154,000 by 2022.
By contrast, property values in the UK as a whole may only rise 3.4 per cent over the next four year, according to the latest economic report, with London likely to experience the slowest growth of all – with growth rates potentially dropping to around 2.6 per cent.
Paul Terrington, PwC Northern Ireland chairman and UK head of regions, said the North's property market had performed better than had been expected and there was an optimistic "positive balance between earnings and house prices".
However, he has also warned that property prices in the North remained significantly below their 2017 peak and that “gap is unlikely to close in the near future”.
According to PwC, Northern Ireland is currently in seventh position in the UK’s 2018 property price growth charts, but it believes the North is likely to accelerate up the chart and rise to number three by next year and top the list in 2022.
Price tag
However its latest outlook report also highlights that when it comes to the price tag for a home in North “even if prices do increase at this rate, they will still be around 28 per cent lower than the 2007 pre-recession average”.
Meanwhile, PwC predicts that Northern Ireland’s economy will grow by a meagre 0.8 per cent in 2018, but could improve in 2019 and deliver growth of around 1.2 per cent . This compares poorly to the UK growth forecasts in general where average growth of 1.3 per cent is expected this year and 1.6 per cent in 2019.
"We are still languishing at the bottom of the UK regional growth league and, with the absence of a devolved administration and Brexit on the horizon, we should all be concerned," Mr Terrington said.
