Rents reach new record high

The average rent asked across Britain, excluding London, has hit a record of £1,126 per month. Rightmove says the figure is 12% up from a year earlier and 19%, or £177 a month, up from before the pandemic. Asking rents in London have surged 16% in the last year, pushing the average to a record £2,257 a month. Rental stock is down 26% on last year while demand is up by 6% although there have been signs of improvement. Rightmove's Tim Bannister said: "The gap created over the last two years will take time to narrow." Rightmove's table of rental price hotspots was topped by Manchester, where the average asking rent was up 23.4% in a year - from £913 in the second quarter of 2021 to £1,127 in the same period this year. In second place was Chatham, in Kent, where the equivalent increase was 21.4%, while in third place was Liverpool, which had a 19.4% rise. The seaside towns of Weymouth, in Dorset, Torquay, in Devon, and Margate, in Kent, had above-average annual increases of 19.1%, 18% and 16.9% respectively.

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