Rents rise at fastest pace in five years: ONS | Mortgage Strategy

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Rent prices marched upwards by 2% on an annual basis in January, shows new data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Excluding London, rents increased by 3%.

This is the fastest pace of growth seen since February 2017, the ONS details, and means that, since January 2015, rents have gone up by 12.3%.

And Hargreaves Lansdown senior personal finance analyst Sarah Coles points out that if only newly advertised rental prices are looked at, according to Zoopla data, average rent in January in fact went up by 8.3% – a bill of £969 per month.

The region sporting the fastest rental growth in January was the East Midlands, racking up 3.6%, while London featured the slowest rent growth, posting 0.10%.

Coles comments: “It looks as though rises are set to go further.

“Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors research found that a slide in the number of properties for rent and another rise in tenant numbers is filling agents with confidence that rental prices will be on the march for months or even years. It expects rent rises to average 5% over the next five years.”

Coles adds: “The Hargreaves Lansdown Savings and Resilience Barometer produced in partnership with Oxford Economics shows that renters have already faced horrible blows to their finances over the past year, and are much less resilient than their homeowning counterparts.

“Renters are far less likely to have money left at the end of the month, so a rent hike will hit them hard. They’re also less likely to have emergency savings to fall back on, so they can’t dip into savings to cover their costs or to fund a move.”


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