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)

Newly built apartment (2 bed.) in SW London:
Bought 2007 for £305K
Sold 2011 for £300K
The price recovered in 2012 (around £350k) and it has gone up since .
Asking price today £500K plus...
Newly built homes value generally dip the first few years but after that it catches up with prices of their surrounding area.
We bought a newly built apartment in 2015 and the value has been increasing since...go figure!

It’s all about timing isn’t it in general. If you buy at the peak of the market and sell at the bottom of a big trough, you stand to lose out. If youre upsizing, you can still gain as the more expensive new place will have fallen by more, assuming the same drop applies (doesn’t exactly due to variations in location and type of property, but in a big nationwide recession, the broad pattern is the same)

When you especially lose is when downsizing as the loss of what you’re selling is more than what you’re buying.

New builds are especially susceptible to it, as are ex-local authority houses and those with aspects that make them a bit less desirable such as odd layouts, busy road etc. Although it’s hard not to look at the price you paid, you really do have to just look at the market at the current time. Negative equity is the real bugger.

Well if anything today has cemented how much I'm willing to accept on the house
Just turned down a final offer of £15.5k less than we paid and that the lowest we'll take is £7.5k under
I just know we can get more but the market has stagnated and we are in no rush other than being impatient

I bought my first flat in mid 2000's for £132k and sold it for £118k 8 years later via auction, so lost £14k.

It was part of a converted Victorian house, and was advised by EA and solicitor (who were in cahoots) that the freeholder was an absentee as they couldn't be contacted before my purchase. I didn't know anything about property purchasing, and was fixated on the money I'd spent so far in the transaction prior to completion to even think about pulling out (hollow laugh). Guess who turned up on my doorstep 2 days after me buying the place???

After 4 nightmare years, I put it on the market for £215k and accepted an asking price offer within a week. Freeholder had never provided annual service charge accounts, although I'd been paying her £50 a month throughout in good faith. Sake fell through as the freeholder wouldn't produce service charge statements.

Worst period of my life for the stress of it all, I was just thankful to get rid of it by the end, and I'd never buy a flat like it again.

We bought our flat for 298k and now on the market at 275k as the flats are hard to sell in our area with lot of them on the market at the moment. We are not hoping to get more than the asking price so ideally loss of 23k

@Starseeking wow that's terrible
I'm glad you managed to get shot of it

Well dh talked me into accepting another offer which was £12.5k less than we paid
Got £5k knocked off the one we are buying but it's still painful

Bought my maisonette for £37K in 1990 - was very cheap as it needed a lot of work doing to it. Equivalent flats and maisonettes at the time, here were £43K. I then did the work. Sadly, sold it in £1996 for £30K so lost about 30%

At least you've sold now @Comps83. Just think how happy you will feel when the sake completes and you can move on from the old property for good. In my situation I was elated, despite the significant loss I incurred.

*when the sale completes

I lost 5k on a property I lived in for about 3 years back around 2008

We bought ours in 2008 for 245. We are selling it now for 230. £15k loss within 12 years. We are supposedly in one of the nicest areas in the UK but we bought when house prices were high.

@Comps83

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

Is there something wrong with it, did you majorly overpay when you purchased, or do you think it’s coronavirus/brexit affecting all houses in the area?

@GreySkyClouds I think it's Covid worries
Nothing round here has shifted for a while .

This happened to us. We should have rented when we lived in U.K. but bought in 2006 and then the crash happened, then we were moved by work to Florida in 2011 and prices had not yet fully recovered. House we’d bought for £650k we had to sell for £585k.
Wiped out a huge £65k chunk, almost all of the equity we’d built up in properties since our first home in the mid 90s so we had to down size in Florida in because our deposit was that much smaller. However, in Florida we bought at the bottom of market and made $40k on that house the three years we were there before finally returning to France. So overall we did gain back some of what we lost.
That’s one of the reasons why I invested heavily into pension funds. I can’t trust the property market to fund a retirement. I’ve seen house values crash spectacularly. There were colleauges in UK who had to put off retirement for a decade because of that crash, I’m just grateful we were a young family with small children then and so had time to recoup the losses.

We lost about 20k on our last house, but it had been on the market for over a year and we'd already moved out, so were glad to cut our losses and get on with things.

DH bought a ‘starter’ house in 2007 for 95k at the peak of the market in the area, we have just sold for 85k after putting around 20k of work into the place. Painful.

I saw a flat on Rightmove the other day, bought in 2007 for £140k now on the market for £90k

neighbours purchased new build £220k and sold for £177k, they weren’t getting any offers worthwhile and needed to move ASAP so went with the best offer.