The town of Much Wenlock is Shropshire’s top property hotspot, with homes selling for an average of £410,333, new figures recently revealed.

The area was unveiled as the most expensive place to buy a home in Shropshire, and is also in the Telford postcode zone, according to the Land Registry.

It topped the Shrewsbury SY postcode’s most expensive homes by nearly £50,000 with detached homes in the Pulverbatch area going for around £361,500.

The south of the county also saw the next three top hotspots, with homes in the Clee Hill area exchanging hands for £346,500 and around Church Stretton for £338,555, while in Pontesbury, detached homes were selling for an average of £338.333.

The research was revealed just a day after Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, said house prices had dived by a record 15 per cent during the past year, wiping nearly £30,000 off the average home’s value.

Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, said: “Prices are now falling at a faster pace than in the recession of the early 1990s and, with mortgage finance still in short supply, the likelihood is the picture will continue to deteriorate in the near term.”

Apart from the Much Wenlock postcode zone of TF13 6, the price of the average detached home in the Telford area dropped to £285,000 near Sheriffhales, followed by £270,750 in Sutton Maddock.

The areas of TF9 2 and TF9 3, just across the Cheshire border near Market Drayton, saw homes selling for about £325,687 and £242,867 respectively.

Semi-detached properties in the Oswestry area were the cheapest homes in the SY area, going for an average of £93,125 and in the TF zone, flats and maisonettes were the cheapest, exchanging hands for about £77,833 in the Randlay area.

The Land Registry figures, which cover the third quarter of the year, from July to September, also reflected the downturn in sales, with 349 sales in the TF region, compared to 561 in the last quarter and 687 in the SY postcode zones, compared to 745.

The latest fall left the average home costing £168,176, down from about £197,698 in October last year.

In Shropshire, the average house costs £175,332 and in Telford & Wrekin, the price drops to £142,989.

Home sale facts and figures:

• The boom area for house sales was Ludlow, with 43 homes sold in the last three months.
• The average detached home in Shropshire sold for £268,812.
• The most expensive semi-detached homes are in Sutton Maddock, with prices set in the region of £270,740.
• 43 flats and maisonettes were sold in the SY postcode zone, compared to 16 in the TF area.
• Telford’s hotspot for sales was the Priorslee/Redhill area, with 25 house sales.

By Business Editor Amy Bould