Housing market has remained subdued through the autumn, says Redrow

He added: "However, we continue with our strategy of delivering our high quality, award winning heritage homes to our target customers."

In a trading update for its annual general meeting, Redrow said it continued to expect its results to be in the guidance range it gave in September of revenue between £1.65bn and £1.7bn and profit before tax of between £180m and £200m.

The statement added: “However, with the lower than anticipated sales rate due to the more subdued autumn housing market they are more likely to be towards the lower end of the range.”

In a trading update for the 18 weeks ended November 3, Redrow revealed that the value of net private reservations in the period was 25 per cent below the prior year at £384m.

Gross private reservations per outlet per week for the period were 0.49 compared to 0.63 last year.

The statement added: “However, whilst our customers are generally financially resilient, with 35 per cent of our private customers being cash buyers many of them are at the top of a house purchase chain. Currently the rate of breakdown of chains is elevated because of difficulties with mortgages lower down the chains.”

“This has caused our cancellation rate for the year to date to rise to 25 per cent and resulted in a net weekly reservation rate of 0.36.”

The total order book on November 3 was £864m of which 66 per cent is exchanged, compared to £1.36bn at the same time last year with 74 per cent exchanged.

“Due to improved timing of affordable legal completions, we now expect the revenue profile for the current financial year to be more evenly split than originally anticipated, with 45 per cent in the first half and 55 per cent in the second half.”

Earlier this week, house building giant Persimmon cautioned over a “highly uncertain” property market in 2024, despite seeing demand edge up last month.

The Charles Church group reported new home completions down 37 per cent year-on-year at 1,439 in the quarter to November 6 and said it was seeing prices for forward orders of new homes for private sale fall 2 per cent to about £277,750.

Persimmon said: “On the whole, pricing remains broadly stable although we have seen a slight reduction in group private average selling price in the forward order book and an increase in the use of incentives, particularly in the South where affordability constraints are greater.”

It said it had faced soaring build costs, but added that these had “moderated” since the half-year thanks to a “proactive approach with suppliers and subcontractors to secure price reductions on both materials and labour over the past few months”.