This year may be most remembered for the Brexit vote – but perhaps it should go down in the annals for the property phenomenon that was March.

According to Lucian Cook, research director at Savills, as the Stamp Duty deadline approached imposing a 3% surcharge on buyers of second homes, most purchasers were buy-to-let investors.

Those investors buying with cash outnumbered those with buy-to-let mortgages by double.

However, the real story is that there was also an unusually large rise in March of transactions by first-time buyers and home movers.

None of these would have been affected by the Stamp Duty surcharge. However Cook said one explanation could be that if they found they were up against competition from buy-to-let purchasers, this could have brought some transactions through in the home owner market.

The market cooled dramatically after April 1, as the new ONS/Land Registry figures now show.

This cooling now looks to have been almost entirely due to the earlier Stamp Duty stampede, although uncertainty ahead of the referendum may have played a part.

However, said Cook,  the sheer size of the boost to the market before April 1 is unexplained, and was far higher than expected.

Agents know that a lot of transactions were brought forward. But were there transactions in March happening that in a “normal” market would quite simply not have done so?