Kelvin Davidson

reduce the appetite to invest in apartments because you'll see investors tend to perhaps buy apartments a bit more often than owner-occupiers.

So maybe there's a few concerns there from the investment community about apartments.

So maybe just keeping a bit more of a lid on prices there.

So yeah, a bit of variability by region, a bit of variability by property type.

But when you add it all up,

relatively flat.

So I got asked by a journalist last week sort of when do we start to see house prices rise a bit more significantly, if we do.

I mean, I found myself saying, well, it could be a few months, yeah, so, you know, maybe the headlines got carried a wee bit away, but the tone of the headline was pretty much, you know, wait till the second half of the year, which I can't remember if I exactly said or not, but, yeah, it's not hard to imagine that if you think about where we've been over the last few months kind of tracking sideways, and, yep,

interest rates are generally down but you know people starting to worry a little bit more now about small increases on some of those terms you know labor market which we'll talk about is not exactly sort of roaring away some economic indicators looking better others not quite so not quite so strong so yeah you know it could be that we we don't see a lot of growth in house prices for a few months yet whether it's the second half of the year or you know towards the tail end of the first half not not sure but yeah it does just feel like there's um you know maybe a little bit of

a little bit of a flat patch to keep working through, I guess.

So yeah, hopefully that wraps it up.

Not much more to be said.

I guess people will just be thinking about where it goes next and that trade-off between lower interest rates, but maybe still a slight bit of economic caution out there.

know watching the labor market seeing the unemployment rate go up in the fourth quarter so there's going to be yeah conflicting forces i mean we had that phrase last year it's it's maybe carried over into the first month of this year might carry on for a little bit a little bit longer yet and there's this wider point i guess we've we've been talking about in terms of um well you know it's not necessarily the worst thing if house prices are flat for a long period of time it's you know not so good if you're trying to be a seller or you want to see some capital gains on property your own but

Good for buyers, of course.

So, yeah, I think this is just a market where buyers still have a window of opportunity, I suppose.

And we're seeing it in our buyer classification data.

First-time buyers still staying really strong.

So, yeah, good news story in amongst all of that.

Yeah, so we saw unemployment rate go up 5.3% to 5.4% in the fourth quarter of last year.