Properties on for £800k+ not selling? Why?

[MuckyBrass]

Near me, there are loads of houses on Rightmove for around £800k, £900k, even up to £1m ish which have sat on the market for a year or two. I've long been desperate to move to a bigger house so I check Rightmove all the time, but my budget is more like £600k so I've never viewed any of them, and really I'm just being nosy. They are all lovely houses, I'd buy any of them in a heartbeat if they were on for £600k. I don't understand. Are they really for sale? Or are they just sitting on Rightmove as pretty houses to make the estate agents's rosters look good? Some of them have had their prices reduced by £100k or even more at various points, but they're still evidently not selling at the £800k plus mark.

I'm in a small (but fairly naice) market town with no train station, not an easy commute to any major city, so I actually struggle to think who would be earning enough or have the cash around here to be the actual buyers for houses in that price bracket anyway. We're not talking loads of land, either. These are normal town houses, period properties mostly, small gardens, 4-6 bedrooms.

The oldest boomers were fortunate to reach working age, then 15, in the late 1950s and early 60s. Jobs were abundant and the economy was catching up on the privations of the war years.

The NHS was 15 years old, and as a GP I interviewed in the mid-90s explained, the range of treatments available for most diseases was limited: if you told someone they had cancer, you spoke sympathetically but neither doctor nor patient dreamed of remission or cure, it was a life sentence.

But there were jobs everywhere in manufacturing and mining, fishing and farming, and if you were fed up you could leave and expect to walk into something else the following Monday. That all started to unravel with the first OPEC crisis in 1972, which caused a property crash. My parents' modest bungalow dropped 50% between 72 and 74, undoing a decade's growth.

Edited to insert a verb....

I'm trying to work out what the answer is in this scenario. Currently your plan is to pretty much stay put, paying increasing bills on a very large home you don't need. And I can understand why, because the math ain't mathing. But, what happens when you need to leave or die? You just pass the problem on to your children.

So realistically, what is to be done with these big houses that people no longer desire? Im guessing there's a price point where some people will buy. But it's likely to be way below the £800k. And i would guess even then there would be a significant of homes that are still too large or undesirable. Do the become multi generational homes? Hmo places? Bulldozed and made into smaller properties?

It's not really aimed at you, just thinking it through to its logical conclusion.

To a degree @Seaside3, we're in the same boat. Our house is very nice IMO. I've lived in it for 30 years. We want to relocate, but we need to cover the costs of relocating, including paying the stamp duty on the house we move into. If we don't achieve a price that covers that, then we probably won't move at all. We like where we are and we could manage living in it in wheelchairs. It's not a mansion, just a spacious family house.

It's not going to be an HMO because there isn't the density of work or transport to make that an option. It could be divided into two separate smaller family units, with plumbing adjustments.

@Seaside3 I wish I knew the answer. We will probably try to sell again in a year or 2.

I think that what is increasingly happening is that people are not buying their dream homes because they start later (in their 30s) and can’t build enough equity. Instead they make do with properties which are just good enough because housing is so expensive. Maybe extend a bit or do a few adjustments.

That’s certainly where we ended up because our perfect home would require 300k extra on the mortgage and we would have to go back to watching pennies. Those 800-900k houses is what we want, but do we want to forgo all holidays and fun for the extra bedroom and bathroom and a tad more space? Not really!

Down south where we are, to get a detached ok size (2000 sqft) house that needs A LOT of work is around 750k-900k which is absolutely CRAZY! None of them are even remotely nice inside. Most id pay for them is £600k

There are people around. Almost all the parents at our kids school live in these sort of properties going into many millions

We bought a listed money pit because we love it. We’ll look after it and it will go to someone who equally loves it.
Friends just bought a £3mill one near us in Kent only recently and despite the current stamp, taxes and col etc

Expensive properties particularly outside London have always taken a long time to sell because the market is smaller. They do though.

We, like the pp, are also wondering what’s the point in paying masses in stamp to move again. Despite our previous plans we may also just stay put in a property essentially bought to house our once larger family

Fair enough.

The problem is you need buyers to do this, if everyone is relying on parents releasing money from property so they can buy property then the ponzi scheme breaks down! The magic ingredient was cheap debt, can"t see that coming back though.

Obviously you’ve got your head screwed on. What people often don’t realise when they are pre-retirement is that you need to downsize relatively early, many older people are left rattling in larger homes because they get to an age when they can’t face moving. We left the family home when we were under 60. This was a huge move from an house similar to yours and. as now, the house wasn’t easy to sell - it took 18 months. We’ve downsized again now, in our 70’s, and hope that we don’t have to move again.
In London the situation is even worse as houses are now “worth” (ie being valued by estate agents) at several multiples of the £800k being discussed here. Obviously buyers would like to achieve the asking but they’re often totally unrealistic - as you say there are just not enough buyers out there who can afford the house and running costs.

We bit the bullet 20 years ago and accepted an offer significantly below the initial estimate which gave us enough for our family’s needs, which it seems you are willing to do. It was the right decision.

Thanks @angela1952 - we’re both under 60 and want to move before then.

We “need” a certain value to clear our mortgage (nowhere near £800k though) but will be realistic about price when we come to sell. We bought 20 years ago so we have plenty of equity (in theory!). I know we’re lucky.

Yes, we also had that house for more than 20 years and it was a great family home. We always felt that we'd been lucky, I got to know local estate agents quite well and they said that it irritated them when homeowners felt that they were clever to have achieved such a large gain (even if it wasn't all achievable). It really is down to luck. We sold to a family which we were very happy about and were able to help our children to move on with their lives.

Depends where you are in the south! My 3000 sq ft detached house may struggle to reach £800k. The kitchen and three bathrooms are all modern, which is not to claim that everyone will like my choices. A new boiler and hot water system cost £10k last year.

For someone born mid boomer years in 1955 looking to buy a property from 1980 borrowing wasn't cheap though.

• 1980-1989: ( boomer age 25/34) Mortgage Rates were very high, peaking around 15-17% in 1980 and hovering in double digits for much of the decade to fight inflation.
• 1990-2007: (boomer age 35/52) After a peak of 15.25% in October 1990, rates generally trended downward.
• 2008-2021: Following the financial crisis, rates dropped significantly, reaching an all-time low of 0.10% in 2020-2021.
• 2022-2026: Rates surged from the 2020 lows due to inflation, with 30-year fixed rates averaging around 6-7% in 2025 and expected to potentially stabilise in the 3.75-4% range by the end of 2026.

So for boomers the magic ingredient wasnt cheap debt. They also couldn’t get credit cards and borrow money as easily as now either. Having a credit card was rare

All true, but house prices were cheaper relative to average earnings. In the past few decades, house prices have risen far faster than average earnings.

Yes, interest rates were higher, but a higher rate on a smaller mortgage is less (in proportion to wages) than low interest on a much higher mortgage.

Eg 15% on a £100,000 mortgage is £15,000
5% on a £300,000 mortgage is the same £15,000

But capital repayments on the £300k mortgage are three times as much as a £100k mortgage, yet most peoples' wages won't have risen three fold over the same time period. Plus, of course, COL increases too, student loan repayments, stamp duty, etc all coming out of the same wage!

My comment related to ‘cheap’ debt ie the borrowing rate

the quality of life has improved on average hugely over the decades that “boomers” have been alive with people now spending much less on food , travel , white goods and electronics, clothes , hobbies etc etc as a proportion of their income , and until recently people were able to get/do more and more of that stuff each year

at the same time house prices have risen disproportionately. 15 years ago I would have said that overall people were much better off than 30 years ago even though they were spending more on housing as a proportion of income and they would have been even better off if house prices /rents had risen in line with everything else instead of much faster

wages have stagnated against inflation over the last ten to fifteen years making things seem harder and house prices /rents have still risen faster making the housing situation a crisis

Yes, but that has helped fuel housing cost price increases, so lower interest but on a higher mortgage!

Looking at averages for 1980
The average U.K. terraced house was
£23,000
The average salary was £6k/annum
Mortgage payments interest only
£23000@15%mort rate = £3,450 ( 57.5% of the average gross salary for one person)
Highest inflation over the year 18%

2025 average terraced house price £240,000
average salary £38,000
Mortgage payments interest on
£240000@6%mort rate = £14,000
( 37% of the average gross salary for one person )
Highest inflation over the year 3.7%

Just from these figures and without knowing the outcome exactly before doing them
I think it’s all the extra taxes on moving, high rents resulting in an inability to save for a deposit, less security in some jobs ( zero hours etc ) and lifestyle changes that are affecting buying.

I was doing the calc whilst you posted so you might find that post above interesting

You can't ignore the capital element of the mortgage. It gives a misleading picture just to talk about interest. The capital has to be paid off one way or another, either by a "normal" mortgage or an interest only mortgage alongside some kind of investment vehicle, i.e. an endowment or ISA or similar. The cash flow "cost" of the repayment of capital has to also be factored into the comparisons. On a much larger mortgage, the cash flow repayment of the mortgage capital (or investment vehicle) has a much bigger impact than it would on a much lower mortgage.

The comment I first tagged was about cheap debt
so I did the calcs based on the debt

was it cheap…absolutely not because interest rates on mortgage debt were massive
was it cheap based on salaries
absolutely not as my calcs clearly show.

We're in a small market town with a railway station and a good service to London. Anything over £700K is taking ages to sell. A large house near us was on for 9 months at £750K before it sold (no idea if they got the asking price) and it was not the only one.

Is the mortgage rate 6% now in 2025? Thought more like 4/5?

Thats 2025.

No idea what they are now but there’s a prediction of a bit of a Spring mortgage war