G.O.O.D

U.K. house prices fell in May by the most since at least 1991 as the shortage of credit starved the property market of buyers, Nationwide Building Society said.

The price of an average home dropped 2.5 percent from April to 173,583 pounds ($344,000), Britain’s fourth-biggest mortgage lender said today in a statement. That’s the largest decline since the index started in January 1991. From a year earlier, prices fell 4.4 percent.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King predicted this month that property values are “likely to fall further” and said there is a risk that the U.K. economy may contract. Mortgage approvals dropped in April by 39 percent from a year earlier, the British Bankers’ Association said this week.

“With demand weakening, we’re not expecting prices to be picking up for some time,” Nationwide Chief Economist Fionnuala Earley said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It would take more than one interest-rate cut to change the trend. We do expect there to be further house-price falls this year.”