Rightmove's best-ever visitor total indicates strong start to 2018 market

Rightmove says it has enjoyed its highest ever monthly number of visitors - 141 million in January.

They spent a total of some 1.1 billion minutes on the site which its commercial director, Miles Shipside, shows that Rightmove is “a great barometer of housing demand.”

His comments are contained in Rightmove’s latest asking price index, in which all bar one of the UK’s regions showed an increase in January. 

Across the whole of the UK, the average asking price is up 0.8 per cent over the month. This is well below the 1.6 per cent monthly average at this time of year over the last decade. 

“Whilst it is the norm for new sellers’ asking prices to be buoyant at the start of a new year, this first complete month in 2018 is seeing more pricing optimism than the comparable period in 2017” notes Shipside. 

“The political and economic uncertainty is out of sellers’ control but they are in control of their asking prices, and in general they are not being overly ambitious or setting too high an asking price” he continues.

But Shipside insists more churn is required to keep market momentum.

He says that nationally, two per cent more sellers have come to market this month compared to the same period a year ago/ 

Rightmove also says there are signs that the increased buyer activity is fuelling a recovery in the number of sales agreed, which in the final quarter of 2017 was running at an average of 5.5 down on the previous year.

Taking the first full month of 2018 as a snapshot, sales agreed numbers in January have now recovered a little to be only 1.6 per cent down compared to a year ago. 

Six out of the top 10 fastest selling locations are in either the East or West Midlands. However, speediest of all is Livingston in Scotland, selling at an average of only 17 days, for those properties that have been newly listed since October 2017 and have sold.

Shipside observes: “Much of the UK still has momentum, with good buyer demand for the right property at the right price, and the recovery in the number of sales agreed is another indicator of pent-up demand keeping the market moving.”