Fastest-selling £1m homes 'are outside London'

Among the homes sold for £1m or more was this one in Cambridge

Cambridge has the fastest selling £1m-plus homes in Britain, taking 45 days to secure a buyer, according to a property website.

Rightmove said the top five fastest-selling £1m property locations were all outside London.

The others were Edinburgh, Harpenden, Bristol and St Albans.

The figures come after BBC research revealed sales of £1m-plus homes rose to a new high in England and Wales last year.

A total of 16,119 property sales for £1m or more were completed last year, up 5.4% from the previous high in 2016.

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Waiting game

Housing market analyst Miles Shipside, from Rightmove, said: "Hotspots like Cambridge have helped the East of England take over the mantle from London in recent years.

"The Scottish million-pound plus market has also picked up as the increased activity in the overall housing market in Scotland is having a positive knock-on effect on the higher end, especially in cities like Edinburgh."

However, Rightmove found it took five days longer to secure a buyer for a £1m-plus home on average than a year ago, when sellers typically took 94 days.

Mr Shipside said: "Those lucky enough to be selling a home worth a million or more should think carefully about what they can do to make their home stand out.

"Potential buyers will be wondering if they can afford not only to trade up to the next rung of the ladder, but also to stump up stamp duty fees."

Earlier BBC research showed sales of £1m-plus homes have more than doubled in 104 local authority areas of England and Wales in the 10 years since 2007.

Investment in areas with leading universities has led these locations to record some of the biggest increases in such sales.

In addition to Cambridge (a 441% rise), there has also been a surge in Warwick (up 317%), Oxford (up 270%), Bristol (up 260%), and York (up 150%).

The rises over the past decade come despite a drop in £1m-plus property sales in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, which hit the housing market as a whole.

How is the number for your area calculated?

The BBC data team analysed all residential transactions sold at full market value in England and Wales from the Land Registry price paid dataset for the period from January 2007 to December 2017.

All transactions over £1m (including those at exactly £1m) were mapped to local authorities using the latest Ordinance Survey's Codepoint Open mapping file from February 2018 that contains data for each postcode unit in England and Wales. Postcodes not found in the OS Codepoint Open mapping file were not counted as part of the analysis, as they could not be matched to a local authority.

HM Land Registry does not cover addresses in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Registers of Scotland data is not free to download and the NIdirect land Registry for Northern Ireland does not make comparable data available.