Harvard and Yale may be North America’s most famous universities but the east coast home cities of these two “Old Ivies” could barely be more different. Harvard is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an affluent and famously left-leaning locale, once named the US’s most liberal city in a study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. It is nicknamed, not always admiringly, the “People’s Republic of Cambridge” and was the first city in the US to elect an openly gay, black man as mayor.

Yale’s home is in New Haven, Connecticut, a city that has earned the unfortunate reputation of being one of the most crime-ridden and ghettoised in the US.

In Cambridge the average property is worth $478,000, up 12.5 per cent year on year, and comfortably outstripping the $421,000 average recorded in August 2008, according to property website Zillow. Charles Cherney, vice-president of Hammond Real Estate, points out that about 80 per cent of the city’s properties are apartments, making these figures appear artificially low. He estimates the current price for a detached home at about $1.4m – a price tag which he says is not deterring buyers in a buoyant market. “I have never seen the market as hot as it is now,” he says. “There is heated competition in all price ranges and in all neighbourhoods.” The reason for this sudden spurt, says Cherney, is threefold. “I think that it is a combination of low interest rates, a reduced inventory, and a recovering economy. It is a perfect storm.”