Rents are now 16.3% higher than five years ago, having risen by 2.8% over the last 12 months, according to the latest buy-to-let Index from Your Move and Reeds Rains published this morning.

In absolute terms, the average residential rent across England & Wales has grown by £107 since January 2010 to reach £763 last month.

This amounts to an average annual rent rise of 3% over the last half-decade. However, this represents a real terms increase of 0.6% per annum when adjusted for inflation over the same period.

Most recently, rents have fallen on a monthly basis, down 0.6% between December 2014 and January 2015.

LSL, parent company of Your Move and Reeds Rains, noted that its data is now “much more closely matched” by the Office for National Statistics after the latter revised its own information.

Annual rent rises in England and Wales have averaged 2.4% since January 2012 according to Your Move & Reeds Rains analysis. The revised ONS measure for the whole of the UK has averaged 2.1% over the same period, considerably closer than the previous version of this “experimental” series, which averaged 1.2% over the last two years.

This morning’s latest index also showed that just 6.8% of tenants are now in arrears, compared with 11.1% in January five years ago, when LSL started producing monthly rental information.