Telford housing market sees slowdown in newly-available properties

The monthly research showed that Telford experienced the fastest decline in newly-properties coming to market of any town or city in the UK last month, following a 23.3 per cent month-on-month drop in property availability.

It was well ahead of the towns with the next fastest-falling supplies, with Barnsley and Warrington clocking falls of 13.9 per cent and 12.1 per cent respectively.

The UK as a whole experienced a 3.7 per cent pick-up in the volume of newly-marketed property in estate agents' windows, and that figure rises to 10.3 per cent when excluding London, which has suffered a market slowdown.

That points to Telford being an outlier, with the number of homes hitting the market dropping off despite the market entering its key spring season, when many people put their homes up for sale.

The study was conducted by online estate agents Housesimple.com, whose chief executive Alex Gosling said: “Although new listings were up in March, we’d have hoped to see more sellers, particularly in London, putting their homes on the market as we enter the spring’s peak property selling season.

“We need a supply boost in April, because the demand from buyers remains strong and thanks to the continued competitive mortgage deals still on offer, they are more than committed to purchasing.”

Parts of the capital saw the volume of homes for sale fall by 40 per cent between February and March, but at the other end of the spectrum the markets in parts of Scotland accelerated over the same period, with property availability up by 87 per cent.

To compile the Property Supply Index, HouseSimple looks at data from more than 500,000 listed properties to track the number of new properties marketed every month in more than 100 major towns and cities across the UK and all London boroughs.