More Britons expect house prices to rise rather than fall over the next twelve months, according to the Halifax Housing Market Confidence tracker. Now, 29% think the average property price in the UK will fall. 22% think it will rise.

The headline House Price Outlook (HPO) balance has therefore moved into positive territory with an overall balance score of +7 percentage points.

This reverses the picture in October 2011 when a plurality were negative about prices; 28% thought they would rise, 30% predicted a fall.

Among owner-occupiers the equivalent HPO figures are 28% and 24%, +4. This is an improvement since October when the HPO was -7.

• Download the survey topline (PDF)
• Download the full computer tables (PDF)

Other headlines:

• Most regions expect an increase in house prices but Londoners are the most optimistic (+21).
• Public sentiment still points to a house buyer’s market and one which isn’t favourable to the seller. Half (50%) think the next 12 months would be a good time to buy a property while only 10% think the same of selling. Three-quarters of adults (74%) and four in five owner-occupiers (78%) think it would be a bad time to sell. Among the latter, 30% consider the next twelve months to be a very bad time to sell.
• Underlining the lack of buy/sell equilibrium in the market at least in terms of sentiment, only 9% of owner-occupiers think the period will be a good time to both buy and sell. Just under half (48%) think it will be a good time to buy, but not to sell.

Technical note

• Interviews with representative sample of 2,009 British adults aged 16+ (incl. 1,301 owner/occupiers).
• Undertaken face-to-face, in-home between 6-19 January 2012 in 155 sampling points across Britain.
• Data weighted to the national population profile by age, sex, working status, social grade, region, ethnicity and tenure.
• An asterisk (*) represents a value of less than one half or one percent, but not zero. Where results do not sum to 100%, this may be due to computer rounding.