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The average price of a home in England and Wales has passed £300,000 for the first time – and it could take someone in London almost 46 years to save for a deposit.

Figures compiled by property website Rightmove showed the typical price of a property coming on the market increased from £299,287 in February to £303,190 this month.

For London, a new record was set, with the average price of a home hitting £644,045.

Meanwhile, a report by estate agents Hamptons International found Londoners’ best chance of buying a home was if they did so with someone else.

Its figures showed couples face an eight-year wait to save enough for a 15 per cent deposit, compared with single people who face a wait of around 45 years and nine months.

Rightmove said the new record across England and Wales is being driven by momentum spreading across the north and west of the country, rather than in London, which has previously been the engine of house price growth.

It said the London housing market is now split, with some boroughs seeing prices surge upwards and others seeing them drift downwards.

Rightmove director Miles Shipside said: "While the start of 2016 has seen an encouraging but modest uptick in the number of properties coming to market, demand and momentum have combined to push prices over £300,000.

"On average, 30,000 properties have come to market each week over the past month, up by 3 per cent on this time last year, but there are insufficient numbers of newly listed properties in many parts of the country to meet demand.”

Some reports have said that a three percentage point stamp duty hike for buy-to-let investors, which starts on April 1, has prompted a rush of people snapping up homes in recent months to beat the deadline.

Nicky Chute, from Foxtons in London, said: "Last year the volume of sales fell across all London zones but least so in zones three to six, whilst prices continued to rise.

"For example, last year 514 properties were sold in Pimlico and Westminster with an average price of £1.2 million, making the market worth £618 million.

"In Walthamstow, where Foxtons opened a branch in 2015, 1,722 properties sold for an average of £395,000, amounting to £680 million in sales. This now makes Walthamstow in outer London a larger market than Pimlico and Westminster in central London."