I find the idea of anything selling that quickly bizarre. Very few properties sell that quick here. Last year was dreadful too. There were lots of sales in Feb / March, we put house on the market in April and the entire market ground to a halt. It was incredibly slow over the summer and there was a particular problem with first time buyers and our price bracket for two bed. It's a highly desirable area for families but expensive, so the trend was for smaller three beds to sell but not much else.
I think the average days on the market is something like 200 for the area for similar properties. We are slightly longer than that but not by much.
The market finally picked up in Feb this year. We waited it out and I'm glad tbh. And we now have a buyer and hopefully we are nearly there.
The house we have gone for isnt what I'd have picked at first. Having the time to properly work out what we wanted helped a lot. We probably would have got something which was less than ideal even though at the time we thought they were our 'perfect' house. We've viewed about 10 properties since we put the house on the market. It seems that viewing when you haven't sold is the norm round here. In the end we knew exactly what we wanted. After we worked that out we stopped viewing until we sold as it was pretty sole destroying seeing properties we had let ourselves get excited about sell. As it goes the house that fitted the bill has been on the market since last July and wasn't one we had even considered until things got moving. Now I haven't seen anything which I'd prefer come up since we put in the offer.
All the agents have been struggling. Part of the problem is that locally market prices have really only just got back to 2007 peak, so locals can't move up the ladder as they've made no equity gains. The only people moving are people moving into the area who made equity gains elsewhere. Locals have largely been forced out of they want to move up the ladder.
If you want to get an idea of how long your house might be on the market for try
www.home.co.uk/guides/time_on_market_report.htm?location=london&lastyear=1
And then search for your area.
There are signs that the market is slower than it has been in many places with the number of days on the market being high than April 2018.
I think if I'd have read this thread last year it would have massively stressed me out as it sounds like there is a very different market here to the one some of you have. I think it almost gives unrealistic expectations. The stress of not getting an immediate offer really did get to me when we first put the house up.
We possibly could have sold quicker but we'd have to had dropped the price more. The urgency of needing to go wasn't huge. I've not seen many properties go without having a small reduction in the asking price either. It's definitely a buyers market rather than a sellers one.
Fingers crossed we will get there now.