YORK house prices were holding steady as the country headed towards the coronavirus crisis lockdown, new figures have revealed.

The UK House Price Index says the average price of a residential property in the City of York Council area in March was £257,398.

This was down slightly on the February average of £258,485 but on a par with January's figure of £257,303.

The March figure was also up on the average of £254,926 in March last year.

The index said the average house price in the UK was £231,855 in March, with prices having fallen by 0.2per cent compared to the previous month, and risen by 2.1 per cent compared to the previous year.

The average property price in England alone in March this year was £248,271, similar to February's figure of £248,587 and up on the figure for March last year of £242,982.

The index uses house sales data from the Land Registry and is calculated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It applies a statistical method, called a hedonic regression model, to the various sources of data on property price and attributes to produce estimates of the change in house prices each period.

The ONS says the Index will be temporarily suspended from the April 2020 index, due to be released on June 17, until further notice

It says this is because the impact of Covid-19 is expected to greatly reduce the amount of housing transactions that took place in April 2020, making it very difficult to produce a measure of UK house prices that would be representative of any true transaction activity within the housing market.

"The UK HPI is based on completed housing transactions," it says.

"Typically, a house purchase can take 6 to 8 weeks to reach completion. Therefore, the price data feeding into the March 2020 UK HPI will reflect those completions that occurred before the government measures to reduce the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) took hold."