Housing activity continued to spike during the week ending 23 August, with estate agency website traffic up 36 per cent on the year, shows Yomdel’s property sentiment tracker.

This is the fourth month of growth in this row on this metric, the live chat service provider says.

It adds that all data points it measures are near record highs. Last week, new vendor enquiries were up 3.19 per cent on the week, new buyer enquiries down 0.89 per cent, new landlord enquiries up 1.78 per cent and new tenant enquiries up 3.67 per cent.

These are, in order as above, 97 per cent, 72 per cent, 23 per cent, and 38 per cent their averages.

Yomdel founder and chief executive Andy Soloman says: “When looking at the crazy levels of activity you can only say astonishing so many times before it becomes boring, but I’ll say it just once more: ‘Astonishing’.

“We have the perfect storm of good intent here, with people swarming across estate agent websites, they are motivated and they want good agents to help them, but there are some real challenges.

“Perversely, agents are telling us they can’t cope with the volumes of new business leads and are struggling to give the right attention to the right people at the right times. It’s crazy right now. We’ve even heard stories of vendors being told by agents they’ll have to wait three weeks to get a market appraisal. That is absolute nuts as it is giving business away.”