Rents hit fresh high as lack of homes available continues

Average rents have continued to hit new highs, according to property website Rightmove, as the shortage of available properties continues.

Asking rents outside London have reached a record of £1,190 a month on average, Rightmove said, while in London they have risen above £2,500.

Rents have been pushed up by fierce competition among tenants chasing a limited number of homes to rent.

Rightmove said there were signs of more properties coming on to the market.

However, while the number of properties available to rent between January and March was up 8% from a year earlier, the number was still nearly half that seen in 2019.

The gap between the number of tenants seeking properties and the homes available to rent also narrowed, Rightmove said, but it still remained "near record levels".

"We have seen some early signs of improvement on squeezed supply levels this year, though with no significant influx of new properties becoming available to rent currently on the horizon, the mismatch is set to continue for some time," said Tim Bannister from Rightmove.

"Many agents are having to manage a very high volume of tenant enquiries for every property that they let in the current market."

It also added that the mismatch between demand and supply was consistent all across the UK.

Last week, one estate agent said that the lack of properties to rent was partly due to a generation of landlords with buy-to-let mortgages deciding to retire and sell up.

Hamptons Estate Agents estimated about 140,000 people who bought property in the 1990s to rent out sold them last year to fund their retirements, and new landlords were not filling the gap left behind.