Is the cheap estate agent pushing up prices?

[Pipbin]

I moved into my street about a year ago. It is a popular and well thought of estate in a great position (walking distance of town centre and two parks). Houses here sell quickly, within about 2 weeks, unless there is something seriously wrong with them.
We paid £164k for our house a year ago. A near identical house just round the corner has just sold with an asking price of £189k and the one a few doors up has just gone one the market for £200k.
Both of these have been on with a new estate agents that only charges something like 0.5%. Is this new agents putting unrealistic prices on the houses? What effect will this have? We've got no plans to move for the next 20 years at least. Am I right to think that it's wrong that this one estate agent seems to have taken over from a long established agent and is pushing up the prices?

I'm not sure why this matters to you. People (and estate agents) can put any price they like on a house. Buyers will only pay what they can afford, and what the house is worth to them. Prices are more likely to be going up because there is more confidence in the market now, there is a shortage of houses so people are snapping up what is available, the houses in question are in better condition/higher spec inside than yours or any one of several other reasons. If you are not planning on moving, the sale price of other people's home matters little and can surely only help your house to have a higher guide value if e.g. you decide to remortgage?

It doesn't matter to me in the slightest, I was just wondering out loud I guess. I just didn't realise that the value of houses was so governed by estate agents.

Estate agents have nothing to do with house prices. The only things that really matter are:

1. Will banks give a mortgage?
2. Is the monthly payment low enough?

When interest rates start rising, house prices will fall

The agent would have influence over the asking price but very little influence over the selling price. If both houses sell/have sold for their asking price then that's because the market has risen in your area, regardless of who the agent is. It may be the case that the one that sold went for less than the asking price.

Its perfectly reasonable to be curious about property prices in your area and its nobody else's business why it matters to you.