IT SHOULD now come as no surprise that house prices go down as well as up. A new analysis of housing transactions in England and Wales shows how important timing is to whether that translates into a profit or loss. Castle Trust, a provider of innovative housing-related financial products, identified approximately 6m properties that were sold more than once between 1995 and the end of 2012. There are big regional variations but if you bought a home before 2003, the chances of making a loss on sale were virtually zero. If you timed it just wrong and bought at the peak of the market in 2007, a subsequent sale was very likely to result in a loss.







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