Chancellor Rishi Sunak - and the agency industry - will no doubt be delighted to know that visits to Rightmove soared 22 per cent in the first 30 minutes after the announcement of a stamp duty holiday.
Sunak yesterday announced that with immediate effect homes selling for £500,000 or less would be exempted from SDLT until the end of March 2021.
The portal has calculated that savings for buyers - assuming current asking prices did not increase as a result of optimistic vendors - ranged from an average of £646 in the north east of England to £15,000 in London.
The portal says it is listing some 510,000 properties under £500,000 in total, making up 81 per cent of all homes for sale in England, and that on average - prior to the announcement - some 84 per cent of all enquiries to it were about sub-£500,000 units.
Ahead of the announcement, Rightmove says it recorded its busiest ever day for visits to the site this week - on Tuesday July 7 - with 7.7m visits.
The portal’s commercial director Miles Shipside says: “This move will help to keep the nation and wider economy moving because keeping the current momentum going will help prevent destabilising falls in property prices as unemployment grows, and enable a quicker economic recovery.
“Lockdown prevented 175,000 would be sellers from coming to market so we hope this Stamp Duty holiday will provide the spur for those missing movers to come to market. They will find there’s currently record demand for their properties from prospective buyers, with Rightmove enquiries to agents now double what they were before lockdown.”
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Translation: 'We can't wait for the discount fee period to finish because, based on these figures and this level of activity, agents will be able to pay MORE than before'.
Calm before the storm... RM playing games in the build up to the return of extortionate tariffs. Don't be fooled without Agents Rightmove would be NOMORE!
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