The average house price has hit a record high for the third month in a row, pushing above £360,000, according to Rightmove.
House prices have increased by a record £19,100 since February, driving the average cost of a home to £360,100, according to the website’s monthly index of property prices.
Tim Bannister, Rightmove’s director of property data, said that the boom in house prices this year had outpaced the growth in property values recorded during last summer’s stamp duty holiday.
“The high demand from a large number of buyers chasing too few properties for sale has led to a spring price frenzy, a hat-trick of record-price months, and the largest price increase for a three-month period Rightmove has ever recorded,” Bannister said.
The record numbers defy warnings that higher interest rates, which will translate to more expensive mortgages, coupled with the rising cost of living, will cause a sharp slowdown in the booming housing market.
Bannister said that the economic headwinds were “being kept at bay by the even stronger tailwind of property market momentum that has carried over from last year”.
Rightmove’s data shows that property prices rose in all of its income brackets across the UK in April for only the second time since 2007. Buyers are also snapping up homes at a record pace of 33 days since they are put up for sale, and more than half of homes sell for above or at the asking price.
The average cost of a home in London stands at £667,110, up 6.6 per cent from the same period last year. In southeast England, the average property is £479,500 and £418,361 in the east. The cheapest region is northeast England, where the average cost of a home is £180,088, an 11.2 per cent increase since last year.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) has said that the booming property market will be hard to sustain as the economy is heading for a potential recession, driven by falling spending, climbing inflation and higher interest rates. It estimates that annual house price growth will collapse from an increase of 8.7 per cent at the start of the year to minus 3.9 per cent in the middle of next year.