The slowdown of the mortgage market has led to the deep discounts, according to Rics.
People selling their homes are imposing deep discounts on their initial asking prices, surveyors said today.
According to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) in its monthly poll of members, offers nine percent below asking price are now being accepted by people desperate to move house despite the declining market.
However, these discounts are unlikely to provide much of a stimulus to the mortgage market - which is still labouring due to banks' tightening of lending criteria in the credit crunch. Effectively, this means that many people who would be buying homes can now no longer do so due to their difficulty in securing a cheap mortgage loan.
Moreover, the slowdown in mortgage approvals - running at around 50 percent, year on year - is also applying further downwards pressure to house prices. Indeed, lenders Halifax and Nationwide have already tracked annual declines exceeding ten percent, with further drops expected over months to come.
Simon Rubinsohn, Rics chief economist, commented: "With housing transactions currently at a 30-year low, many vendors are being forced to lower their asking prices to achieve a sale in an ever shrinking market or they are being forced to rent their property until the market picks up."
