Record high for average price of homes

Spring home buyers are facing the highest ever prices demanded by sellers, with the average price tag on a home rising nearly £7,000 in the space of a month.

Across Britain, the increase of £6,733 or 2.1% month-on-month pushed average seller asking prices to a record high of £327,797 in April, Rightmove said.

This was more than £4,000 higher than a record set last October.

The average asking price for larger “top of the ladder” family-sized properties jumped by more than £18,000 month-on-month, from £571,983 in March to £590,293 in April.

Top-of-the-ladder homes are made up of houses and flats with five bedrooms or more as well as four-bedroom detached properties.

Properties generally are being snapped up by buyers at a record speed, Rightmove said.

In the first two weeks of April, estate agents were marking homes as sold in 45 days on average and 23% of properties that had a sale agreed in March had been on the market for less than a week.

Both these figures were the highest that Rightmove had ever recorded.

Rightmove said the “mass market” of twoand three-bedroom semi-detached homes tend to be selling the fastest, with 30% of those that are being marked as sold by agents having been on the market for less than a week.

Tim Bannister, Rightmove’s director of property data, said:: “Housing market activity remains high in Scotland where there has been no extension to the land and buildings transaction tax holiday which has now come to an end, which suggests that the same could happen when the tax holidays start to come to an end in England and Wales from the end of June.”