The flood of new-build apartments at auction has dwindled but some lenders are off-loading repossessed homes as fast as they can.

Lorna Blackwood, Times OnLine – 27 March 2009

Prices of city-centre flats in Manchester appear to have finally reached the bottom of the market. These apartments felt the brunt of the credit crunch, with some selling at auction at up to 60 per cent below their peak value in 2007.

Andrew Wells, of the auctioneer Allsop, says that prices have steadied since last summer, although there is no sign of prices rising. “The good news is that there are very few city centre flats coming to the auction market at the moment,” he explains. “We have an auction next week, and out of 400 properties just one is in Manchester city centre.”

The flat in question is in the Sorting Office development on the northern fringe of the city centre, and has a guide price of £85,000-£95,000, a considerable drop from its valuation of £247,000 in February 2007. There has, however, been a lot of interest in the flat, and Wells expects it to sell for at least 15 per cent above the guide price.

Things were much worse a year ago when more than 2,000 properties were for sale in the city centre and auction rooms were filled with cut-price repossessed flats. Experts believe that the problem began when a series of new developments were built on the fringes of the city.

Two years ago, these developments were selling for as much as apartments in central Manchester, but the value of fringe properties soon fell as a result of oversupply, low demand and a flood of repossessions in the buy-to-let market. Full Article