House buyers and renters are looking to move home after the lockdown ban temporarily closed the property market.
The latest data from online housing portal Zoopla shows 60% of people wanting to move home want to go ahead with their plans.
The figures show that the market has already bounced back to pre-coronavirus lockdown levels.
But Zoopla argues that the lockdown impact on house prices is uncertain and is unlikely to go back to normal for some months.
Price data from the 20 cities providing sales data for the survey shows mixed sentiments.
Nottingham leads the way positing a 4.1% increase to an average £158,000 – up 0.3% year-on-year, but second place Leicester weighs in with a 4% increase that is 0.6% down on April 2019.
Bottom-placed Aberdeen’s results are just as confusing. Although prices have fallen 1.7%, that’s still better than April 2019’s 5.1% drop.
“Millions of UK households have spent a considerable amount of time in their homes over the last 50 days. Many are likely to have re-evaluated what they want from their home and are looking for change. This could well explain the scale and speed of the demand returning to the market,” said a spokesman.
“It is hard to square the rebound in demand against projections for a sharp rise in unemployment and a major downturn in economic growth in the second half of 2020 and into 2021. We expect the economic impact of COVID-19 to feed through into market sentiment in the near term. We expect the recent spike in demand to be relatively short-lived, with demand likely to moderate over the coming weeks.”
UK City House Price Index – April 2020
| City | Average house price | Year-on-year change April 2020 | Year-on-year change April 2019 |
| Nottingham | £158,000 | 4.1% | 3.8% |
| Leicester | £183,700 | 4.0% | 4.6% |
| Manchester | £173,200 | 3.8% | 4.0% |
| Leeds | £169,200 | 3.1% | 2.8% |
| Edinburgh | £232,500 | 2.9% | 4.7% |
| Liverpool | £121,800 | 2.7% | 2.9% |
| Birmingham | £167,100 | 2.5% | 3.7% |
| Cardiff | £210,500 | 2.5% | 2.7% |
| Bristol | £280,700 | 2.4% | 1.6% |
| Sheffield | £138,700 | 2.2% | 3.5% |
| Belfast | £137,800 | 2.0% | 4.2% |
| Glasgow | £118,900 | 1.6% | 3.0% |
| Cambridge | £411,500 | 1.3% | -1.3% |
| Portsmouth | £239,500 | 1.1% | 0.5% |
| London | £476,900 | 1.1% | -1.0% |
| Bournemouth | £288,400 | 1.0% | 0.9% |
| Newcastle | £127,100 | 0.8% | 0.8% |
| Southampton | £226,800 | 0.2% | 60.0% |
| Oxford | £399,600 | -0.8% | -0.8% |
| Aberdeen | £143,200 | -1.7% | -5.1% |
| City index | £253,900 | 1.9% | 12.0% |
| UK | £217,000 | 2.4% | 0.9% |
Source: Zoopla/Hometrack
