UK house sales reach two-year high

UK house sales reached their highest level in more than two-and-a-half years last month as confidence continued to return to the market, surveyors said yesterday.

The sales jump helped to send expectations that house prices are set to increase in the next year soaring to a three-year high, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) found.

Surveyors sold an average of just under 17 homes in the three months to February, marking the highest volume of sales recorded since June 2010.

The sales uplift is predicted to continue into the spring, with a balance of 8 per cent more surveyors expecting transactions to increase rather than fall back over the next three months.

Prices remained broadly flat, with 6 per cent more surveyors saying that prices had dipped rather than increased, continuing a trend seen since last autumn.

However, in the longer term, there is a “growing suspicion” that house prices are set to edge upwards again, according to the RICS.