Is the property market cooling down?

There is an article in today's Daily Mail claiming house price growth cooled in July.

The underlying data does not seem so sensational with prices increasing by 0.3% per month down from 0.4% in the previous two months. It will be interesting to see if this is a trend that we can expect to continue or if it is merely some sort of statistical blip. Even a rate of 0.3% implies an annual increase of over 3% which is a little bit higher than inflation. We need to adjust for inflation to see the real rate of increase, and it seems prices have been broadly static - up a bit, down a bit - since 2009.

It seems we can assume the market may or may not be cooling down. But the market is currently rather tepid.

The other interesting point in the article is that the average deposit by a first time buyer is now £26,859(I am not sure of the source). I am not sure what the source of that information is. But it is clearly a huge amount of money - equivalent to almost a year's worth of income for the average household before paying for any items of expenditure.  You can see why the government is keen to offer support to those who wish to buy.