The RICS House Price Balance for June 2025 recorded a -7%, compared to an expected -9%. The prior reading was also -7%.
A property tax hike in April led to a downturn in the UK’s property market. The impact of this hike is gradually decreasing. New buyer inquiries have turned positive for the first time since December, along with improvements in agreed sales. RICS suggests the market is entering a more stable phase, with demand stabilising after previous volatility.
Understanding RICS House Price Balance
The RICS house price balance assesses the difference in opinions among surveyors about house price changes. The earlier disruption from advancing transactions due to Stamp Duty changes seems to have mostly settled, enabling underlying trends to be observed again.
There has been no movement in the GBP.
The underlying message here is that although the property market in the UK remains slightly subdued, it is showing cautious signs of repair after months of pressure. The tax alteration in April had distorted behaviour across both buyers and sellers, encouraging many to rush transactions forward ahead of the fiscal change. That caused a temporary spike, followed by a mechanical fall. Now, what we’re seeing is the dust beginning to clear.
The RICS balance figure of -7% means more surveyors are still reporting a drop in house prices than those noting an increase, but not by a wide margin. Expectations were that the decline would widen, which didn’t happen. That deviation matters. It hints that the worst of the drawdown linked to taxation may be in the rear-view mirror. Still, it’s not a return to growth—a fact that would temper certain expectations.
Positive buyer inquiries for the first time since last December matter beyond the headline—they signal revived interest from those previously sitting on the sidelines. When this coincides with better figures in agreed sales, we can begin to treat these as patterns rather than odd months. Survey respondents, through the RICS measure, are pointing away from volatility and towards something more even.
Market Reaction and Future Outlook
From a market reaction standpoint, the lack of any move in sterling underscores how traders had already priced in the tax adjustment’s immediate effects. With the surprise limited, the data did not change expectations enough to warrant a material reshuffle in asset positioning.
However, the forward-looking aspect deserves more emphasis. If underlying buyer interest is indeed rising again, especially in the wake of taxation headwinds, then demand momentum could outpace currently conservative pricing assumptions. From our perspective, any patterns in sales or inquiry persistence over the next month become essential markers. These would need closer tracking, particularly in regional breakdowns, where some areas often lead others with a slight delay.
What Cox and his colleagues appear to be picking up through the survey is not merely soft sentiment turning stable, but the foundations of renewed engagement. That can feed into upstream economic indicators. Related sectors—home building, furnishing, even consumer credit—tend to reflect such shifts with a small lag. For markets built around that timing, anticipation becomes the primary advantage.
With GBP unmoved and property sentiment slightly improved, we would interpret this as limited upside to volatility in the very near term. But the assumptions that are baked into short positions in property-sensitive instruments are beginning to expire. Timing here matters; not all mispricings correct themselves at once.
The market may now shift its attention more to micro-level factors—regional dispersion, monthly lending data, developer activity. As the broader fiscal shock softens with time, smaller variables return to the foreground. Anything that shows continued normalisation in transaction volumes or an uptick in listings with matching demand will likely filter into secondary pricing instruments quickly.
So, from here, traders who rely on underlying data—and not just top-level sentiment—ought to keep watching for deviations between projected and actual buyer behaviour. Recent resilience, while modest, deserves attention not because it’s spectacular, but because it wasn’t expected.
