UK house prices to fall another 13 percent

It has been a while since we saw such a cheery forecast for the UK property market.

Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. house prices will plunge another 12.7 percent before bottoming out, according to bond investors surveyed by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

Britain’s homes, which have already fallen 15 percent since October 2007, have further to fall, said 86.4 percent of respondents to RBS’s poll of mortgage-backed debt investors. The U.K.’s biggest bank controlled by the government distributed the result of the survey in an e-mail to clients on Aug. 21.

“General opinion was that U.K. housing has another down leg to take,” RBS said in the note.

RBS’s survey contradicts evidence U.K. real estate is starting to recover as the economy emerges from the worst recession in decades. House prices rose for a third month in July, according to Nationwide Building Society, while the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said Aug. 6 that prices will increase this year, reversing an earlier prediction of a drop of as much as 15 percent.