House prices has seen its fastest rate of growth in more than two years

House prices rose by 5.4% in the year to February, this represents the fastest rate of growth in more than two years.

Official figures released by the Office for National Statistics revealed that the annual rate increased from 4.8% in the year to January.

House prices rose to £292,000 in England or 5.3% annual growth rate, in Wales values increased 207,000 by 4.1% and £186,000 or 5.7% in Scotland in the year to February 2025.

Elliott Jordan-Doak, senior UK economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, said, “Official house prices will be boosted for at least another two months by the flurry of activity ahead of the stamp duty changes.

“But there is genuine strength in the housing market.”

CEO of Yopa, Verona Frankish, said, “Whilst house prices remained unchanged in February, we’ve continued to see positive growth on an annual basis and this is a far better measure of the ongoing improvements seen to the health of the UK property market.

We also saw the Bank of England implement a second base rate reduction in February and so it’s only a matter of time before this boost to buyer market sentiment starts to accelerate the level of house price growth being seen across the market.”

Director of Benham and Reeves, Marc von Grundherr, added, “As predicted, the UK property market has continued to stand strong during the first few months of the year, demonstrating that the improvements to market sentiment seen over the course of 2024 are here to stay.

Whilst we’ve seen a renewed degree of economic instability in recent weeks thanks to Trump’s tariff war, this is unlikely to deter the nation’s homebuyers from their property purchasing ambitions in 2025.

Now that the dust has settled on the stamp duty deadline, we expect that the positivity of the first few months will only strengthen over the course of the year and the outlook remains a very good one indeed.”

CEO of Octane Capital, Jonathan Samuels, said, “Since the Bank of England first decided to cut interest rates in August of last year, we’ve seen mortgage rates trending downwards and there’s no doubt that these improvements to mortgage affordability are helping to positively stimulate the UK property market.

The mortgage landscape is only expected to improve as the year progresses with further cuts to interest rates on the cards and these cuts could start to come thick and fast should Trump’s insistence on global economic instability start to drive up inflation.”