UK property market ‘on the up’ amid new year bounce in asking prices

The UK housing market is enjoying a new year bounce, with the average price of a home coming up for sale increasing by the largest monthly amount in a decade, data shows.The property website Rightmove said almost £10,000 was added to the average asking price of a British home in the space of five weeks.Rightmove said much of the increase was down to the housing market regaining its optimism after speculation about possible property tax changes in the November budget led to a slump in activity, as many owners and house hunters put their plans on hold. The Bank of England’s interest rate cut a few days before Christmas also gave the market a boost.Rightmove’s data showed that the average new seller asking price rose by 2.8%, or £9,893, month on month, taking the typical figure to £368,031.It said this was the largest increase in the month of January in 25 years, and the biggest rise in any month since June 2015.The data, which is based on tens of thousands of properties put on sale by estate agents between 7 December and 10 January, paints a much more upbeat picture of the market than the most recent figures issued by mortgage lenders Halifax and Nationwide. Both said UK house prices fell in December, by 0.6% and 0.4% respectively.Jeremy Leaf, a north London estate agent and former Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) residential chair, said: “Although the Rightmove survey looks at asking rather than selling prices of newly listed homes, activity is definitely on the up, buoyed by falling mortgage rates and inflation.”He said buyers and sellers “breathed a collective sigh of relief” when property tax changes in the budget turned out to be “not as punitive as many expected”.In the run-up to the chancellor’s set-piece statement on 26 November, amid intense speculation about what might happen, the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp said “people are in a panic” about potential stamp duty changes and “sitting tight”. In the event, the main property measure announced was the “mansion tax”, a council tax surcharge for homes in England worth more than £2m.Rightmove said home movers were returning to the market: in the two weeks after Christmas, buyer demand rose by 57% compared with the two weeks before, while the number of newly listed homes for sale jumped by 81%.While the figures will please many homeowners, they will not be welcomed by prospective first-time buyers already struggling to get on the property ladder. However, Colleen Babcock, a property expert at Rightmove, said asking prices “are only back to where they were in the summer of 2025, before the budget rumours began surfacing”.Moreover, the headline figure disguises wide regional variations. Areas that recorded above-average asking price rises include the east of England (up 3% month on month), while the East Midlands and Scotland bucked the trend with price falls (down 0.6% and 0.4% respectively).Separate data issued by the estate agent Hamptons showed that average private rents in Great Britain ended 2025 below where they started for the first time in many years.The average rent on a newly let property dipped by 0.7% in 2025, the first time it has fallen over a full calendar year since the company’s records began in 2011.It means the average tenant moving into a property paid £1,371 a month – £10 a month less than 12 months earlier.