There was a surge of landlords moving into the UK property market last week, according to the latest data from Yomdel.
Its property sentiment tracker recorded the highest number of new enquiries from buy-to-let landlords since the previous September. In total the number of enquiries from landlords rose 8 per cent when compared to the previous week. These figures are for the week ending February 14.
However while there has been a surge in property enquiries from landlords, Yomdel also recorded falling numbers of tenant enquiries, which were down 14 per cent over the same period. However it said that levels were roughly where they were a year ago in a pre-Covid market.
Elsewhere Yomdel recorded a drop off in the number of both vendor and buyer enquiries in the residential market. Vendor enquiries dropped by 10 per cent on the previous week, while buyers dipped by 1 per cent.
This is the first week in 2021 that there has been a decline in the number of vendors and buyer enquiries. Yomdel says this may reflect uncertainty over whether the stamp duty holiday would be extended, together with the ongoing gloomy economic outlook.
Yomdel says that despite these falls though the market remained busy overall with all key new enquiry indicators up when compared to February last year. For example enquiries from new vendors were 30 per cent above the average and 12 per cent higher than the same week last year.
Yomdel adds that engagement with own-branded estate agency websites increased again and is now 28 per cent higher than the same week last year and 43 per cent higher than the corresponding week in 2019.
It says this shows that the growth in digital adoption by estate agent customers shows no sign of slowing, and this is in turn generating record volumes of new enquiries for agents.
Yomdel founder and CEO Andy Soloman says: “While the market is somewhat directionless at the moment and some people may be holding off making new enquiries to estate agents, it is clear that record numbers of people are nosing around property websites.
“With the right stimuli, such as an extension to the stamp duty holiday beyond 31 March, there could be another explosion in demand.”
He adds: “Landlords have been the surprise of the week, hitting the highest volume of new enquiries since the heady heights of last summer’s booming market.”
Yomdel provides a managed live chat services to estate agent offices in the UK. These figures are based on an analysis of this data and website visitor data from a sample across major estate agency groups in the UK and covers in excess of 50 million unique website visits back to January 2019.
