A survey claiming that asking prices for Isle of Man houses dropped more than anywhere in the UK comes with ’covered in health warnings’.

Website Zoopla drew up a table that showed the difference between asking prices and selling prices was £41,212 - or 8.3% - in the Isle of Man.

But Policy and Reform Minister Chris Thomas said some of the data relied upon had been ’experimental’ and was not based on actual sale prices.

’If buyers and sellers of houses in the Isle of Man want to use the Zoopla statistics so be it,’ he said, ’but they come covered in health warnings because of the nature of those statistics.’

Estate agents have already poured cold water on the significance of the unofficial figures, pointing out that, in a small area such as the Isle of Man, one significant price change could have a massive influence on the overall percentage change.

The Manx Independent reported their reaction in last week’s paper.

They also said Zoopla did not have access to actual sale price data, only asking prices, which are usually different.

Mr Thomas pledged: ’I will ensure I do communicate with Zoopla, making sure they understand the official statistics that are available in the Isle of Man about house prices.’

He admitted there were ’issues’ with the official statistics, including a lack of information on the size of houses being sold, but the methodology was being reviewed.

The matter was raised in the House of Keys on Tuesday by Rob Callister (Onchan), who expressed concern about the ’negative coverage’ the Zoopla report had generated.

Mr Thomas said: ’The issue with Zoopla statistics is that the information is typically about the asking price for properties, which may or may not be the selling price.

’The point about official statistics is that we accurately sample people and we do them properly, which is different from Zoopla.’

He added: ’Some data derived from Zoopla was first analysed and presented as experimental data in the first Housing Market Report which was published in April 2017 and covers 2016.

’It is not intended to include the same data in the 2017 report given the limitations of this type of data.’

Mr Thomas said it was clear there were ’duplicate entries’ in the Zoopla sample.

’There are all sorts of reasons why the Zoopla statistics are exactly what they are: statistics provided by the provider of an internet service, which can be useful, but they are not the same as official statistics.’