Buying a home is a major investment and most often it is the largest investment an owner makes in their lifetime. While there are many factors that go into buying a home, everyone hopes their investment will appreciate in value and allow them to remortgage for improvements and for lower interest rates through the lifetime of their mortgage. Keeping the home in shape is one part of having the value retain or increase, but most often it has a lot to do with location.

Many areas of the UK have seen double digit value increases in property due to strong demand. For those that are looking to make their home purchase return in value, it might due them well to consider the areas that saw healthy increases over 2014.

London throughout the year has had strong increases, with Greenwich and Ealing experiencing almost a 25% boost over the year. Nine out of ten areas in London have had strong property increase: Greenwich, Ealing, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Brent, Southwark, Hackney, Sutton, and Kingston upon Thames. The only area outside of London to make up the top ten with house price increases was Crawley in West Sussex.

Greenwich has benefitted from the Olympic effect with value increasing that area by 24.6% and the average house price valued at £328,000. Overall in London, the average house price increased by 13% in 2014.

The least likely place to buy in 2014 came out to be Bury, which experienced negative growth by 8%. Overall the average UK house price increased by 8% in the last year to £209,428.