by business editor Trevor Sturgess

Housebuilder Persimmon is seeing confidence returning to the market in Kent and the south east.

The UK’s largest housebuilder said today it would complete 9,000 homes this year as the market stabilised.

However, it expressed concern about rising unemployment and lack of mortgage finance.

Persimmon has developments across the county, including Ashford and Strood.

Edward Owens, managing director of Persimmon Homes South East, said: “We are delighted that we are seeing confidence returning to the housing market with prices stabilising over the past year, visitor levels have remained strong through the summer and maintained over the past few months, cancellation rates are down despite the restrictions on mortgage finance availability.

“We did set ourselves challenging but realistic budgets given the economic climate and in most cases we have achieved much better legal completions than we expected. As an example, our Bridgefield development in Ashford has seen a real upsurge in customers moving into their new Persimmon home."

He added: “We remain cautiously optimistic that the market is steadily improving. We are well placed to purchase more land and believe it is the right time to move back into investment of new development opportunities in the right locations”

Analyst Richard Curr, of Prime CFDs, said, it was a strong performance with good forward sales. Trading activity since first-half results in August continued ahead of last year, with strong sales for 2009 and a further £500m of sales already taken for 2010, about 50 percent ahead of the same point last year.

Housing prices remained firm with an increase of about six per cent in the average selling price of homes reserved since July 1 to £175,000.