Taylor Wimpey has raised the price of new-build homes in response to “significantly better” housing market conditions.

Britain’s biggest housebuilder said that it had not experienced the usual summer slowdown, as homebuyers chased the few properties on the market. Indeed, Taylor Wimpey said that it had run out of completed stock for sale for the rest of the year. The homes it is selling are due to be completed next year.

The average selling price of a Taylor Wimpey home was 9 per cent higher than the £163,000 average paid in the first half of 2009. The group attributed the rise partly to a shift in emphasis away from building flats in favour of family homes and partly to general price increases in the past three months.

Redrow, another housebuilder, forecast further price rises yesterday, after net reservations rose by 47 per cent since July, to an average sales rate of 45 homes per week.

In a sign that investors share the renewed confidence of the housebuilders’ chief executives, Redrow said that it had received 97.2 per cent take-up of its £150 million equity-raising. Barratt Developments said yesterday that its £720 million equity-raising had received take-up of 92.3 per cent.

Signs of the more optimistic outlook came as Rightmove, the UK’s biggest property search engine, said that it achieved its busiest ever month in August, traditionally a quiet homebuying period. Halifax yesterday reported a rise in house prices of 1.2 per cent in October. Cluttons, the London-based estate agency, forecast that prices would rise by up to 2 per cent in 2010 in a “best case scenario”, but could fall by as much as 5 per cent.

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