UK House Prices - Asking Prices Finally Falling

Asking prices finally started to fall in June according to FirstRung.co.uk who obviously got their hands of an advance copy of the Rightmove's data for June. Apparently asking prices dropped 0.4% in June, having risen considerably in the figures for April and May.

When the index has shown rises I have said that this indicates that vendors are being unrealistic, and the fall in asking prices backs up one of two things, either:

The vendors who are selling their house are becoming more realistic about their asking price.

Or

A high proportion of the most unrealistic vendors have now admitted defeat and withdrew their property from the market, which is now dominated by realistic sellers.

As FirstRung rightly pointed out, the average asking price according to Rightmove is still about 40% higher than the average sale price according to the Land Registry, meaning vendors still are not being realistic generally.

I actually said in my report into the RM index for May, that when asking prices started to fall according to Rightmove, that is when I would think the market is close to bottoming. But such a nominal fall will need to be followed by falls of a lot more than that before I think the UK housing market is anywhere near bottoming.