Home sales hit their highest daily level in a decade last week, as the housing market boom continued apace. The number of property sales agreed on Tuesday 23 March was the highest for ten years, according to analysis by the UK’s biggest home listings website Rightmove. In total, just under 8,000 properties listed on the site were marked as having had sales agreed by agents. Around 95% of homes sold in the UK are posted on Rightmove, and it currently has more than one million listings across sales and rental. In addition, daily visits to the Rightmove website also smashed the all-time record. The record was surpassed when more than 9.1million potential home buyers – and window shoppers – visited the site. The previous record was set on 3 March, the day of this year’s Budget. It was then that Chancellor Rishi Sunak confirmed that the stamp duty holiday, which had been due to end on 31 March, would continue with a maximum saving of £15,000 until July and then be tapered down until October. The stamp duty holiday and people reassessing their living arrangements due to the pandemic have fuelled a housing market boom since the end of the first national lockdown in summer 2020. The average home increased in value by £17,000 in the last year, according to official figures published this week, and nearly two in three properties on agents’ books are currently sold subject to contract. In 2020, home-hunters spent 15.9 billion minutes on Rightmove. There were 2.1 billion visits and people sent 1.6 enquiries to agents every second. An imbalance between demand for new homes and the number of owners deciding to sell up has been fuelling bidding wars and driving up prices. This has been termed by some as the strongest sellers’ market of the past decade. Some rural areas have particularly hot housing markets as buyers look to escape city life and get more space. One estate agent in Saffron Walden reported doing 18 viewings in 24 hours on a £1.2 million property. Although there is still more demand than supply, Rightmove said more homes were now coming to market which could help to ease the pressure on buyers.

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