January was ‘boom’ month including 12% surge in sales agreed for estate agents
Portal says its website was deluged with people searching for property and that in some areas it has recorded huge increases in numbers of sales agreed.
Is the UK property market experiencing a ‘Boris bounce’ or not? It’s a debate that has been raging on social media for several weeks but Rightmove has broken ranks emphatically to highlight booming demand from buyers and renters.
The portal says the number of sales being agreed by agents increased by 12% during January year-on-year, the largest surge in activity it has recorded since July 2017.
But this was an average across the UK – the number of homes reaching ‘sale agreed’ increased by 26% in London, 20% in East Anglia and 19% in the South East.
The portal says its website also experienced the busiest January ever with 152 million visits during the opening four weeks of the year, a 7% increase on January 2019.
Busiest day ever
Much of the additional activity on the portal took place during the final week of January and Wednesday 29th was the busiest during which 5.7 million visits were made to the Rightmove website, 9% more than the previous all-time busiest day in April last year.
Rightmove says this surge in activity has been created largely by house hunters looking to buy a home as the public mood of uncertainty lifted following the General Election and the New Year.
The portal’s Housing Market Analyst Miles Shipside (left) says a large number of agents have told him that sales and valuations have picked up in their local area as home-movers have sprung into action.
“There’s still an imbalance, with demand growing at a faster rate than new supply and no clear sign yet of any uplift in new listings compared to this time last year, but we could see a new wave of sellers in the coming weeks,” he says.
Read more: Will 2020 be a ‘bounce’ year.
