The average house in Croydon will now set you back more than £370,000, a rise of nearly 15 per cent in a year.

New figures from the Land Registry show prices in the borough have risen 14.7 per cent in the 12 months to February, more than the average London rise of 13.5 per cent.

The average house in Croydon now costs £370,766.

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Alex Parsons, Croydon’s representative for Generation Rent, a group that campaigns for affordable private rented homes, said the cost of buying had pushed him the leave the country.

The 27-year-old lives with his parents in Purley and had planned on buying his own place, but has decided to use his savings to go travelling instead because the dream of owning his own house is “out of reach”.

He said: “I have kind of given up at the moment – I am going travelling to spend some of the money I have saved.

“The responsible thing to do should be to try and save up and buy a place but the dream just seems so out of reach that doing something else with the money seemed more practical.

“Roughly speaking it is bad for people in my position or similar positions because it isn’t going to be a temporary thing. If it has gone up this year it is probably going to go up next year as well.

“It is hard to catch up. If you are saving now, can you actually save enough as house prices rise? I would say that’s rarely the case.”

Analysis from property website Zoopla this week revealed renting offers better value for money for those living in London.

The average monthly rent for a property in London is £2,109 compared to the average monthly mortgage repayment of £3,377.

Lawrence Hall, spokesman for Zoopla, said: “The housing supply pressure in London in particular has become so intense that getting on to the property ladder can be significantly more costly per month than renting.”

Some 3,125 homeless families in Croydon were living temporary lodgings as of February this year.

Of those, 1,120 had been waiting for a home for three to five years, 237 had been on the list for five to 10 years and 92 others had been waiting for more than a decade.

Last year, 880 families applied to be registered as homeless – a 15 per cent increase on 2013-14.

Figures from London Labour in February showed the average monthly rent in Croydon was £1,025 and the average cost of securing a home in the borough was £2,841.

In the same month Croydon Council marked the latest stage of its £22m initiative to increase social housing stock in the borough with the completion of 74 new homes.

The council hopes to build a further 700 new homes sites across the borough by 2019, which will be a mixture of council and private properties.