The national asking price average rose to £272,003, a 3.6 per cent rise which is the biggest on record since April 2002.

Agents blame the late Easter and May bank holidays, which meant that many owners didn’t put their homes on the market, causing an even greater lack of supply in peak house hunting season.

Demand for housing remains strong: email enquiries to agents on Rightmove were up by nearly 20 per cent so far in 2014, compared to the same period last year.

The annual rate of increase is now 8.9 per cent, the highest year-on-year rise since October 2007, when it was 10.4 per cent.

In London however, the new seller average asking price of a property is up by 16.3 per cent (+£82,893) year-on-year compared to an average 4.9 per cent (+£11,028) in the rest of England and Wales, leading to allegations that the capital’s housing market is in dangerous ‘bubble’ territory.

However, Rightmove’s Miles Shipside says that for a bubble to pop there would have to be a sustained drop in demand, which he can’t see happening in London: ‘Agents in the capital report a consistently high level of would-be buyers in markets that are not yet out of reach for Londoners.’

The average asking price in London is up by nearly £80,000 so far in 2014, an average of £4,405 per week compared with the weekly average of the rest of the country, which is £1,521.

10 out of 32 boroughs have seen annual increases of over 20 per cent. Asking prices in Tower Hamlets rose by 43.1 per cent (+£186,809) which is the largest in London, mainly because prices in Canary Wharf are distorting the figures, say local agents.

Canary Wharf-based Ben Butler, Sales Manager of Morgan Randall explains the borough’s 43.1 per cent increase: ‘A number of areas of Tower Hamlets are investor territory, with a number of cash buyers in the market and accidental landlords, who have been sitting on the side-lines since 2008 taking advantage of the buoyant conditions and selling up.’

Butler estimates that around 65 per cent of the properties he sells are to cash buyers and he hasn’t sold a property for below asking price since around August 2013.

‘As an example, one property sold in December 2013 for £425,000 and in March of this year an identical property in the same building sold for £575,000. That’s a £150,000 difference in just a few months,’ he says.

Agents in the north of the country are blaming the boom in the south for ‘unrealistic’ asking prices by sellers.

Paul Wilson of Dacre Son & Hartley in Leeds says:

‘All the talk of the rising prices in London and a supposed nationwide bubble has created a wave up the country of vendors raising their expectations, and in some cases putting their property on the market for too high an asking price than is realistic in the market here.

‘Those properties that are put on at sensible prices are moving quickly, so we are advising people they need to be realistic with what they expect to get.’