English housing market bounces back as lockdown eases - Rightmove

The English housing market has rebounded strongly after lockdown restrictions were eased, industry research showed on Monday.

According to property website Rightmove, the price of property coming to market in England has risen by an average 1.9%, to £337,884, compared to March, before the market was put on hold because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Lockdown restrictions saw estate agents close and viewings halt from late March until early May, but demand has recovered quickly, said Rightmove. The property website said there should have been over 175,000 sellers coming to market during the lockdown and that sales fell by 94%.

But it said its research indicated that the market had proven more resilient than expected, with “a strong initial bounce back in all metrics”. By 5 June, overall sales were just 3% below their level a year previously.

Miles Shipside, Rightmove director and housing market analyst, said: “Following the initial shock of the early reopening of the housing market, England is getting moving again with a boom in traffic on Rightmove. There are no signs of panic selling, or even a price dip.”

A total of 40,000 new sales have been agreed since 13 May, with buyers agreeing to pay 97.7% of the asking price on average, an improvement on the 96.6% recorded for sales completed in February.

Estate agents reported receiving record numbers of phone calls and emails, including a high on 8 June more than 40% on up the level seen in early March.

The ten busiest traffic days on the Rightmove site were recorded in May and June, with people spending collectively 955,000 hours browsing on Saturday 6 June alone.

Shipside added: “On this evidence, buyers may now be trying to exchange quickly, as there are signs of high pent-up demand and upwards price pressure, rather than downwards.

“Lenders may also have been concerned about price instability affecting the risk profile of their low-deposit mortgages, so hopefully this will give them more confidence to increase their range of first-time buyer products.”

Marc von Grundherr, director of estate agent Benham and Reeves, said: “A huge uplift in stock entering the market, and an increase in the average asking price, demonstrates there has been little to no dent in seller confidence.

When you couple this with the fact that buyers are now paying a larger percentage of asking price than previously, it’s clear that any suggestion of a market crash couldn’t be further from the reality we’re seeing on the ground.”

Rightmove’s update covered England only as there is currently not enough data available for Scotland and Wales, which have taken a more conservative approach to easing lockdown measures than Westminster.