Cannot get rid of this one bed flat in 2022/23!!

[Littlewiseone]

Quick summary and longish post:
Living in a one bed, GF flat with partner and 16 month old. Been here since I moved in while six months pregnant with the view we would move out to a house asap. We met just before lockdown so things moved quickly. Fast forward to 2023 and we cannot seem to get this flipping flat sold!! Am at end of tether, we both are.

-situated in London, not far from Essex
-Ground floor with lovely garden
-leasehold (Freehold is the local Council)
-90 years left on the lease and had started the process of paying to extend this through the council to make it more attractive to buyers.
-good sized flat and well maintained with a new £8k kitchen installed in 2017. Lovely.
-okay area - not the best unfortunately but like everywhere in London, you go half a mile down the road and to £1m houses for sale.

Since December 2021, we have had THREE offers on the flat accepted. They all fell through, through no "fault" of ours. We are currently on the fourth buyer and suspect it's game over too, as of today.

-First one ghosted us as the sale went on too long. The top seller gazumped their buyer, so we all suffered. But for months and months, we thought it was all going ahead.
-second buyer a housing association. Pulled out after 8 weeks due to lease length. We did everything we could as mentioned above but in the end it didn't work for them. Why didn't they check this earlier!!
-third buyer non committal. Wanted 20k off the property weeks after accepting it.
This is due to the fact that major works were carried out on the block in 2022. Scaffolding up for MONTHS, work could have been done in weeks. Don't get me started on that. The major works bill for my partner's flat is 10k. Can you imagine? You buy the cheapest flat going to get ahead, and the council send bill after bill for works they just have to do all of a sudden after 35 years of nothing.
As it stands we are going to pay the charges ourselves, rather than a new buyer taking those on. It's not a good sell. I get that. But we won't actually benefit from the work.
Third buyer pulled out.
-Fourth buyer, offered two weeks ago and we accepted. Should have know it was a no go as our (new!) Estate Agent really had to hunt her down to get that offer. Again, non-committal and has not appointed a broker or a solicitor yet and never answers the phone. Hasn't officially said she is pulling out but we have been here before.......

I cannot put into words how INSANE we feel about the whole thing. We stayed with our firsr estate agent for three rounds. We had to move to a new one as it was just so diabolical in the end.
We have also lost four houses now. Our potential fourth in Chelmsford where we really really want to live. As I said, fourth is not officially a no go but I am 100% prepared.

What I would like specific feedback on:

-similar experiences in the past 2-3 years and outcomes
-advice on how to sell a leasehold - can we be doing anything differently? Are there any loopholes you know about to help sell a leasehold or make it more attractive?
-why do you think so people make offers, then don't even have the manners to send a quick email to say "I'm out". I don't get it.
-any other words of wisdom or comfort most welcome. I'm really feeling so incredibly low today. We just cannot get out of this awful cycle!

Thank you x

Price you paid for the flat is irrelevant now, so it's worthless using it as a guide.

What's the price of the competition nearby? If you want to get out then it has to be priced competitively around that.

If it was a rising market and someone offered you the price you paid you'd just tell them they were an idiot and to look at the prices of comparables.... yet (at least in London) we have a falling market for flats for some time, people try to get the peak price then fail and wonder what they did wrong.

I would think the flakiness of the latest buyer is most likely because there are better options out there, not because they are ghosting for the fun of it.

You don't say exactly where it is but get a list of comparables in roughly the same proximity and be honest with yourself.

The lease and works are really offputting, and most likely people will factor that into their offer. So that person offering £20k off to account for it might well be right, and given a roughly similar flat without these issues, you will have to price at £20k less.

Unfortunately the market doesn't really care how much deposit you need for your ownward purchase.

I’d be thinking about whether I could get shot of it at auction. The problem is that in recent years there has been so much publicity around major works that people are wary of this in a way that they might not have been when your partner bought. The market is falling and it probably is worth less than you paid for it. It sounds like an absolute millstone and I would be tempted to see if I could just offload it and start again. Not easy I know - the hardest and most protracted sale I had was trying to sell an ex-council property and that was in an easier market.

Don't think auctions are that great because then a big chunk of the target market (FTB) are not gonna go for it, maybe because they can't, or there is the perception that because it couldn't sell on the regular market there are some nasties in it.

I've been watching the auctions recently and some flats have gone way way under what would be tried for on the open market, and these are relatively new builds in London with nothing (as far as I can tell) wrong with them.

Honestly everything has a price at which it'll go. I've seen a block in S London where sales seem to have been slow, sellers trying to hold the line and remain with each other. Properties have been on for ages there, the usual chain of going high, making one or two price cuts, taking it off, putting it on with another agent and then starting the whole cycle again.

Some of those properties I think have been up for over 2 years without selling.

One broke the mould and just put it on for OIEO £350k and it was gone in a week. But originally these flats seemed to be around £440-450k, and the stale listings were at around the £400k mark.

We dropped over 10% off what we paid for a 2 bed flat in Sw London in 2017, and even with this price drop we had hard time selling, a few buyers turning off. Just drop the price and cut your losses befor it gets worse with current rates

Will the council buy it back? It would be worth asking them if you haven't already

If you can get the lease extension done it would be worth reapproaching the housing association to see if now if interest.