The first full day after David Cameron’s surprise Help to Buy announcement saw traffic to Rightmove’s Help to Buy section increase fourfold.

The property website chalked up 60,000 page views of its Help to Buy pages on 29 September. The previous Sunday saw just over 14,000 views of Rightmove’s Help to Buy section, consistent with the daily average throughout September.

Miles Shipside, director at Rightmove, said: “Such an immediate surge in people coming to Rightmove to find out more about Help to Buy is remarkable but indicative of a lack of accurate information elsewhere.

“A lot of the talk to this point has been about the politics of the scheme and the implications of government intervention in the housing market but this is the clearest sign yet that, trying to make sense of all the debate, are lots of home movers for whom this scheme is genuinely exciting.”