12 month percentage change by Region:

• Yorkshire and The Humber    14.0
• North West    12.8
• East Midlands    12.4
• South West   10.9
• West Midlands   10.7
• East   9.4
• South East   7.9
• London    3.7

These increases are not just reflected in the UK housing market. In the United States, house values have gone up 11.6% over the past year, with house price rises in the suburbs, outpacing those in cities, while nationwide inventory across the US was down 20% compared to the previous year.

Factors which will have contributed to an active property market will be the availability of mortgages, at unusually low interest rates and the stamp duty “holiday” introduced by the Chancellor and extended across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This would offer a potential saving of £3,750 on the average house value of £275,000 with those spending £500,000 or more, able to save the maximum £15,000 in tax.

Exemption from Stamp Duty paid on housing transactions may have on occasions, tempted sellers to request higher prices as the buyers’ overall costs are reduced.

A number of factors have fuelled these increases and the effect of the pandemic and the associated lockdown may even have changed the way we select our homes.

The pandemic has resulted in a large number of people being introduced to working from home and attending online meetings using software such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, as Government directives discouraged travelling into offices and face to face interaction with colleagues. It would now appear that in the longer term, employers have also seen the cost benefits of requiring less office space and are now seeing home based working as a real benefit to them in financial terms.

As a result of this surge in home based working apparently becoming the new normal, house buyers appear to be reassessing their housing requirements. Working from the dining room table may have been tolerable in the short term but is not a feasible option in the longer term, particularly during school holidays. Suddenly, space for a home office has become less of a “nice to have” and more of a “must have”.

This would go some way to explain the fact that we have seen the average price of detached properties increase by 11.7% in the year to March 2021, in comparison with flats and maisonettes increasing by 5.0% over the same period.

One Estate Agent was recently quoted as saying that internet speed has become a real issue to homebuyers, adding that four or five-bedroom detached houses, where people can have one, or even two offices, allowing them to work from home were becoming more sought after. Other potential homebuyers have opted for property with rear garden space which they can use to site a “garden office”, separating their work/life spaces.

Also an issue in the evolving house price market, is that the need to commute to and from an office every day is no longer as important, because home working and the home office become more of a way of life. This is reflected in the higher rate of house price increases being seen in rural areas and the much lower increases in cities and urban areas, not only in this country, but in the US.

Another ingredient in the house price mix is the fact that as demand for housing has increased, the availability of houses to the market has not kept pace with nationwide inventory, down 20% compared to the previous year.

Financial markets of any kind are always difficult to predict and the house price market is no exception. In the short term, experts expect the market to level out as the Stamp Duty holiday ends in September, while the Government's own regulator of finances expects UK house prices to fall around one or two percentage points in 2022 whilst some others have predicted around a 5% drop as unemployment levels increase post furlough.

At the beginning of lockdown, there were expectations of a fall in activity in the housing market and an associated drop in house prices, this proved not to be the case. However, with salaries increasing annually by around 3%, house price increases of the magnitude experienced this year would not be sustainable and a flattening off of the curve must surely be inevitable.