A new report by Zoopla has found that sale agreements on 373,000 homes have been halted since the government froze the housing market at the end of last month.

The UK Government issued official guidance on March 26 urging people in the early stages of buying or selling their home to delay the transaction while emergency measures were in place. It said that no visitors were allowed into properties, including estate agents, surveyors and potential buyers.

The Scottish Government issued similar guidance urging buyers to delay moving to a new home while stressing that there may be no need to pull out of transactions.

According to Zoopla, this housing market freeze has resulted in a £1bn backlog of estate agency sales revenue.

Most of the stalled transactions were agreed between November and February and would have been scheduled to complete between April and June, The Times reports.

Simultaneously, agreed new sales are running at a tenth of the levels recorded at the start of March. The rate of collapsed deals peaked on March 23, the day that the prime minister announced the lockdown, and has dropped as the volume of new sales declines.

Property developers and estate agents are hoping for a fast market recovery. Richard Donnell, director of research and Insight at Zoopla, said: “Once the coronavirus restrictions are relaxed, we should expect the release of demand that has been building since Brexit and political uncertainty destabilised market sentiment.”

However, Zoopla has predicted that half as many sales will be completed as last year. It has joined the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the professional organisation for estate agents, in urging the UK Government to implement a stamp duty holiday to help to support a recovery in the market.

Zoopla said that it was too early to estimate any impact on house prices as sales volumes had fallen by 90% since the start of March. Last month, its UK cities house price index registered the lowest monthly growth for more than a year at 0.1 per cent — a third of the monthly growth rate recorded in January and February.

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