Fears of a supply crunch eased in the past week as a fresh surge of new vendors and landlords piled into the market after the Easter beak and in readiness for a significant relaxation in coronavirus lockdown restrictions across the UK, the latest data from the Yomdel Property Sentiment Tracker (YPST) shows.

In the week to midnight Sunday, vendors leapt 40% and new landlord enquiries rose 24% giving hard-worked estate agents welcome relief as they stared down the barrel of recent worsening stock shortages. Buyers also rose a further 17% to their highest level since late July last year, while demand from tenants also jumped 27%.

Activity on estate agent own-branded websites remained exceptionally strong, with the volumes of people visiting 184% higher than the second week of lockdown in 2020, and 34% higher than the equivalent week in 2019. In turn, the volume of live chats was 76% higher than last year (28% higher than 2019) and the quantity of leads generated 80% higher than a year earlier (64% higher than 2019).

Yomdel provides 24/7 managed live chat services to 3,800 estate agent offices in the UK, handling more than a 1.9m chats per year. It has analysed the data and leads captured in live chat going back to January 2019, up until week ending 11 April 2021. The website visitor data is a sample across major estate agency groups in the UK and covers in excess of 50 million unique website visits back to January 2019.

“The high spring tides are now washing across the UK estate agency world to deliver exceptional demand for their home-moving services. Coronavirus, for all its horrors, has been one of the greatest set of stimuli to affect the property sector and this latest influx of potential vendors will be very welcome,” said Andy Soloman, Yomdel Founder & CEO.

“It’s still a strong sellers’ market though, and agents need to be doing everything they can to ensure they are able to identify and engage with every possible potential vendor and landlord. The data on this is clear and the  message is a simple one: Think Digital. Web traffic is at historic highs and people are converting to leads at higher rates than we have ever seen before,” he added.

The YPST methodology establishes a base line average shown as 100% or 100, calculated according to average engagement values over the 62 weeks prior to the first national lockdown on 23 March 2020, and plots movements from there according to the volumes of people engaging in live chat, their stated needs, questions asked, and new business leads generated. Data is measured over full 24-hour periods.

New vendors surged 39.88%, or 47.47 points, to end the week on 166.51, some 67% above the average, 242% higher than the same week last year at the beginning of the initial lockdown, and 56% above the equivalent week 2019.

Buyers jumped 16.92%, or 28.27 points, to close at 195.33, 95% above the pre-covid-19 average, 170% above the same week 2020 and 90% higher than the equivalent week 2019.

Landlords rose 24.14%, or 22.71 points, to 116.95, some 16% above the average, 100% higher than the same week last year, and 69% higher than the same week 2019.

Tenants climbed 26.66%, or 27.46 points, to close at 133.04 some 33% above the pre-covid-19 average, 14% above the same week last year, and 16% higher than the equivalent week 2019.

The following graph looks at the relationship between website visitor volumes, live chat volumes and the volume of leads generated. The data samples more than 50 million visitors to estate agent websites from Jan 2019 – 11 April 2021 and shows how web traffic (blue line) is 184% higher than the same week last year. The volume of people using live chat (red line) and the numbers of new business leads captured (purple line) are 76% and 87%, respectively, above the same week 2020.