Buyers and sellers continued to return to the property market in February, and are expected to boost the number of home sales by 10% this year, according to the latest data from property website Zoopla.
\nAll measures of activity were higher than in February 2023, the company said, with agreed sales up by 15% and buyer demand up by 11%.
\nAs a result, the market is on track to reach 1.1m transactions across the year, up from 1m in 2023, it said.
\nAcross the UK prices were down by 0.5% year-on-year, although this masked regional variations. In Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, the Midlands and the north of England prices increased, but across the south of England they fell.
\nWhile Belfast recorded a 4.3% rise in prices, in the east of England there was a 2.1% drop.
\nThe areas experiencing falls were those with the highest prices, where buyers have been most hit by affordability problems caused by rising mortgage rates and other increased living costs.
\nLast summer,\u00a0rates on fixed-rate mortgages reached their highest level since 2008\u00a0as the money markets responded to the rising base rate.
\nSince the Bank of England paused rate increases, after the move up to\u00a05.25% in August, prices on mortgage deals had been falling, and Zoopla said this had supported the upturn in activity \u201calong with faster growth in household incomes\u201d.
\nHowever, it noted that the cheapest, sub-4%, mortgages were now being pulled by lenders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Buyers and sellers continued to return to the property market in February, and are expected to boost the number of home sales by 10% this year, according to the latest data from property website Zoopla. All measures of activity were higher than in February 2023, the company said, with agreed sales up by 15% and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9PjAq-18q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4367,"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4366\/revisions\/4367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poseidon-gp.com\/property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}