The mortgage market has sparked into life following the “lull” the housing industry go off to in the first week of the year, according to online platform Twenty7Tec.

Monday (18 January) was the fifth busiest day in two years in terms of searches, says the Bournemouth-based mortgage business.

The firm says this “shows that the ‘lull’ of week one seems to be over and searches have spiked again”.

Twenty7Tec sales director Phil Bailey adds: “As we predicted a few days ago, lockdown 3.0 and the New Year period merely meant some pent up demand.

Yesterday was the fifth-highest day for search activity on our platform and was at 98.13 per cent of our highest day ever – 25 August 2020.”

Bailey says: “My gut instinct tells me that people have now priced in the end of stamp duty. When it comes back at the end of March, it is what it is. People are clearly not going to let it get in the way of their need to move home.”

The spike comes after a slow start to the year, reported by the mortgage technology firm just last week.

It said the first week of January was the slowest since 2018 in terms of the number of searches compared to the busiest week of the previous year.

The total number of mortgage searches in the first week of a year is usually around 75 per cent of the previous year’s busiest week. But in January 2020, this dropped to just 67.43 per cent of the prior year’s high.

At the time, the firm said the industry had to find a way to navigate the “quadruple whammy” of Brexit, stamp duty changes, Covid, and the state of the broader economy.