If you sold your house for less than you paid, how much did you lose?

[Comps83]

We're selling what was a new build 5 years ago for £2.5k less than we paid. For context we only paid £142k . It was was valued at £145k by ea but we went for the lower amount, hoping for a quick sale.

I know new builds lose value so I'm not sure we have it on low enough
Market's stalled here. Nothing is moving and nothing new is coming up
I'm just interested to know how much other people have lost compared to what they paid? (Not including the housing crash fallout)

Bought my flat for 305 four years ago and current selling for 287.

I lost £10k on the sale price and £10k on improvements. But it's only money and I may have lost more as time went on.

I read somewhere that we are welded to the idea that property always make us money but it does not. It is just somewhere to live

New build 9 years ago. Sold this month for 5k less than we paid. We had spent around £20-25k on improvements, I would say. So we lost £5k on sold prices but a lot more if you add the improvements we had made.

20k. Sold in 2013

Very interesting topic, OP.

I wonder, what sort of properties are taking the hit to resale (i.e. number of bedrooms, detached vs flat, garden vs none/small terrace only, car parking, distance to town? Part of the country?

Was the sale under time pressure i.e. probate, divorce, job loss?

Some areas and types of housing are reportedly gaining value but it seems clear this isn't even close to across the board from posts above.

What percentage of prior sale price is being lost?

@PicsInRed I spend a lot of time on Rightmove and you can see what people bought them for originally and I can't see many are losing money but obviously it happens

I never expected to make money on it but I do begrudge losing a lot

I feel like we've priced very competitively with houses on our estate . I'm not sure why but the exact same house as ours is on for £20k more on the 2nd phase and then there is a small house on our street with is on for more than ours and has been on at the same price for over a year now

I need to make the decision , either wait (but I've been waiting since June last year when we first reserved a house which fell through in October) or reduce even more , or maybe even rent it out as rentals are always in demand in this area . There are currently none available !

We bought our house for £7250 over fifty years ago so obviously it’s worth a lot more than we paid (even at 15% interest) but relatively, we haven’t made a lot of money on it if we want to move within the area.

15k.

But we were moving to a new build and they dropped that by the same for us, so I don't feel like it counts.

Well we just had a call from ea with someone offering 17.5k under what we paid
Nope
I'd rather stay put

I thought you almost always lost on new build houses. Much like a car they depreciate the moment you buy them then pick up after about 5 years. Can’t remember where I read that.

I'm willing to lose £7.5k
Anything less I'd rather stay put

Not strictly our loss but we bought a house in 2002 for £250k, spent £25k improving it and sold it four years later for £400k. I can see on Rightmove that the new owners stayed there for 7 years and then sold it for £290k so a whopping £110k loss!

I can only assume that they were desperate to sell as houses close by are still gradually increasing in value.

We bought our first flat in London for £287k in 2007/2008 (can't remember) just before prices plummeted.

We sold for £250k in 2012, so lost £37k (plus all the £s spent on new bathroom and replastering hideous artex walls).

BUT house prices had fallen everywhere. And actually if we hadn't sold then we would have very quickly been priced out of the town we moved to (commuter town outside London).

It does feel a bit galling when I think hard about it but really it's swings and roundabouts with house prices...

@WhatHaveIFound

Not strictly our loss but we bought a house in 2002 for £250k, spent £25k improving it and sold it four years later for £400k. I can see on Rightmove that the new owners stayed there for 7 years and then sold it for £290k so a whopping £110k loss!

I can only assume that they were desperate to sell as houses close by are still gradually increasing in value.

It may be only half/portion of a house sold- so someone buying out a family member after death or divorce?

There is 1 house on our street which is very low on sold prices and that was the reason.

£15k back in 1990, bought at £65k and sold for £50k. Lost my £10k deposit and we never really recovered as shortly afterwards exH's start up business went tits up too.

I feel like we've priced very competitively with houses on our estate . I'm not sure why but the exact same house as ours is on for £20k more on the 2nd phase and then there is a small house on our street with is on for more than ours and has been on at the same price for over a year now

The smaller house on the market for the same price as yours is obviously over-priced if it's not sold in over a year so I wouldn't worry about that. When you mention the same house in the 2nd phase, if you mean it's a brand new build being marketed at £20k more than yours I think that should mean yours is about right. I recently bought a house a few years old on an estate where there are also new houses being built and the brand new ones are slightly smaller with no garage but being marketed for about £230k whereas we bought ours for just under £200.

@toomanydoghairs no the £20k more one isn't brand new either . Though I know people pay more later in the development. They have a better view but that's the only difference
The smaller one is deffo overpriced . They can't be in much of a hurry to move

Not on a sale but on a purchase we noted that we purchased our property in Sept 2020 at the same price the existing owners purchased it in April 2018. Because of stamp duty they incurred at the time in April 2018 they lost £90k (and possibly more if they had a mortgage - interest payments, home improvements, insurance, fees etc.). But there was a temporary housing slump in 2016 to 2019 (in London) because of the whole brexit insecurities and a slow recovery since plus impact of COVID hasn’t helped.

Thanks @StopTheTrainWantToGetOff I hadn't realised that.

Back in the early 90s

Bought flat £36k
Part ex flat £31.5k
Housing company sold flat £23k

Same housing company that part ex had sold us the flat new

Amount of guilt felt = 0

It wasn’t me that took the loss but the previous owner of my house (Victorian, not a new build!) bought it for £257k in 2017 and then sold it to us for £249k two years later. It was rented out though so they might not have made a loss when the rent is taken into account.

We lost 10 grand. Bought new build in 2010 for 175 and sold for 165 in 2013. Couldn’t wait to move out though as I hated the area and we had found a house we loved (and are still in)

Op, What area are you in? Just might be quiet due to lockdown

A friend of mine has just accepted an offer on her flat for 3k less than what she paid, and has just put an offer of 5k over the asking price for another house which had loads of interest

Back in the 90s we bought a flat for 35k and sold 4 years later for 21.5k.