Cambridge beats London as fastest selling location for properties in UK
Despite the talk of the London housing market overheating, it is Cambridge where houses are selling like hot cakes.
According to data from Rightmove, a house in Cambridge stays on the website for an average of 27 days before it is marked as sold, above the average for Great Britain which is 65 days.
Cambridge is joined in the top 10 seven London boroughs, and the capital is the region where selling times are dropping fastest.
What is clear from the data is that houses are selling much faster this year than they were in 2013. Cambridge is seeing its houses on Rightmove for 30 per cent less time than last year, while Lewisham, Sutton, Bromley and Bexley are all seeing properties sell around 40 per cent quicker.
The most attractive areas are getting more alluring, but the slowest selling local authorities (LAs) were mostly going in the other direction, despite the overall trend in the housing market. Here are the slowest ten LAs:
None of these areas is in the most expensive part of the country (London and the south east), showing perhaps that higher prices may not yet have reached the level at which they start to dampen demand.
There is a real regional lottery at play here, with a 47-day difference in average selling time between London on 41 days and the north east on 88. In the south of England the average wait is 53 days while that number rises to 69 for the midlands and 86 for the north. Wales and Scotland have average selling times of 87 and 74 days respectively.
The continued demand for house is shown by a look at the overall behaviour of the regions compared to last year.We can see that waiting times are dropping across the board:
Even in the north west, which saw four local authorities on the slowest 10 list, and Wales, which had three, average selling times had dropped by five per cent. London was the region where times had dropped the furthest, by 32 per cent from 60 days to 41.
The south saw the biggest drops, and the north the smallest – again reflecting the disparities in the market. When you consider this information alongside house prices by region, the London effect becomes ever clearer.