UK House Prices Up 0.5 Pct In November

LONDON (AP) — House prices in the United Kingdom rose 0.5 percent in November as the pace of the recovery in the market slowed, a major mortgage lender said Tuesday.

The Nationwide Building Society, Britain's third-largest mortgage lender, said the November rise left the average price 2.7 percent higher than a year earlier.

For the September-November quarter, prices were up 2.8 percent compared to the previous three months, the company said. That compared to a 3.5 percent quarter-on-quarter rise in the three months through October.

The quarterly figures are considered a smoother indicator of trends, Nationwide said.

Martin Gahbauer, Nationwide's chief economist, said unemployment had not risen as steeply as feared, and this meant that more mortgage-holders had been able to hold on to their homes rather than make forced sales.

"Even though workers who have been forced from full-time employment into part-time work will have experienced a reduction in income, the impact has been less severe than it would have been if they had lost their jobs completely," he said.

"Together with the fact that mortgage rates have fallen sharply as a result of base rate cuts, this has meant that far fewer borrowers have fallen into arrears than would normally be the case in such a deep recession," he said.