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.

How much did I borrow for this!

London is quite large and diverse, you know, and £800,000 is not entry level. It's above average. Have you ever been outside of Barnes? 😂

@Aluna
@BrownTroutBluesAgain

Honestly, don't waste your time. It's the poster with the weird changes of font (check their edited post) - long and weird history on the MN property forums. They've been hoping for a massive crash for years.

It’s an average price though for a terrace for London
Yes you can get houses cheaper and yes you can spend a lot more
but I read the average for a terrace was £875k for last years sales

Barnes is lovely though, I used to row at Thames Tradesmen at Barnes Bridge, had to trek back to Tooting to afford to live though.

Thanks 🙏

Rightmove seems to have the average cost of a terraced house at <£750,000.
Of course Barnes is a very pleasant area but it certainly does not constitute the whole of London by a very long way! It's simply incorrect to pretend the everyone in London is spending multiple millions on housing.

We haven’t established that you’ve ever been to London.

You can buy a house in outer London for 800k - Worcester Park, Enfield; you can buy a house in a scruffier area of inner London - some parts of E, SE, etc; or you could buy a very small house in smarter area of inner London - but hard to find.

Figures for the last year:

Overall average of house prices in Central London was £1,278,384. Right Move.
Terraced properties in Central London average of £3,231,286. RM
Detached properties in Central London average £2,783,333. RM

Average price of terraced house SW London was £976,000 - £1.3 million RM
Average price of detached house SW London was £2 - £2.6 million+ RM

Average price of terraced house NW London was £902,810. RM
Average price of semi-detached house NW London was £957,425. RM
Average price of detached house NW London was £1,877,009. Zoopla

Average price of terraced in W London was £1,599,976. RM
Average price of semi-detached house average was £1770,897. RM

Average price of terraced house in EC London was £1,242,500 RM
Average price of Semi-detached house in EC London was £1,500,000. RM

Parts E & SE London are cheaper as I said. Excluding areas such as Hackney, Blackheath, Dulwich which are in line with above.

Nothing wrong with Tooting! Good location, transport and great hospital which have spent chunks of time at.

Google tells me the average price for a terraced house in inner London is approx £1.1 million.

Plumplot stats data produces useful graphic on inner London that supports this - data sources includes land registry and ONS.

Oh yes 1.1mill for inner London actually sounds very cheap

I’m not knocking Tooting I had a great time there sharing with people who have become forever friends and as you say great transport. I lived in Tottenham too which always gets a bad wrap but you can’t beat the amazing local shops selling gorgeous veg, cakes and Turkish bread I still yearn for.

Here’s one of my favourites in Hyde park
thanks I’ll check out Plumpot

Very nice, I like this one.

Going in for a nose 😁

Wow
I see our taste is similar re internal decoration
but yours has a pool and that gorgeous garden is dreamy !

Entry level, LOL.

Sales volume is what counts in a healthy market though, more people are taking a loss so they can move.

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/london-homeowners-now-most-likely-in-uk-to-sell-for-a-loss-b1265810.html

Check out HMRC website for stats

The headliner by the standard there is definitely trying to draw a certain type of reader in isn’t it because
the actual article isn’t as inflammatory or ‘shock horror’ at all

‘ Across the UK, the average homeowner sold after nine years, for £91,260 (or 41 per cent) more than they paid.
While London sellers tended to see a higher cash increase, selling for £172.510 or 44.6 per cent above their original price, most of this uplift was due to historic price growth’

It’s not a particularly healthy market. But if you read own link -

Only 14% are taking a hit on price and of that 90% are flats.

A pp explained to you that flat values in general fell during/since Covid and have never recovered.

Moreover, from the article:

Across the UK, the average homeowner sold after nine years, for £91,260 (or 41 per cent) more than they paid.

While London sellers tended to see a higher cash increase, selling for £172.510 or 44.6 per cent above their original price, most of this uplift was due to historic price growth.

So homes sold after 9 years are seeing a loss of uplift rather than out & out loss.

Overall, London house sellers were more than six times less likely than flat sellers to make a loss – 3.5 per cent compared to 22.2 per cent – and, generally recorded higher gains too.

Bit too much brown for me - but great size, location, garden and pool.

The sales volumes are still down, that is why people are seeing 800k and other price bands not selling, if two houses sell in a postcode all year that will be what is used to create the average for that year.

"A pp explained to you that flat values in general fell during/since Covid and have never recovered."

So nothing to do with the price of property debt going up?

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/Bank-Rate.asp

Two houses eh?

All property types sales volumes in the £750k-1M+ price band in 2025:

SW London:

• £750k - £1M 16% of the market 1,500 sales
• Over £1M 22% of the market 2,100 sales

NW London:

• £750k - £1M 14% of the market 526 sales
• Over £1M 20% of the market 776 sales

There are multiple factors at play. Does this sealioning have a point?

Actually we were trying to sell a flat in London post pandemic and pre-Truss budget, when rates were still about 1-1.5%. And prices were falling even then, if you didn’t have any outside space.

It was Grenfell that put people off leasehold flats at first I think, and then lockdown put people off further. The Truss budget was the icing on the cake, but it wasn’t the main cause.

Bond Yields went higher under RS, media were strangely quiet though, my graph points out the obvious reason for the big drop in demand/price, lockdown isn"t a reason as it ended years ago and most people couldn"t afford to leave their flat and "race for space" anyway, that was just used by the Vested Interests to get easily manipulated people borrowing on bigger houses in the countryside, fire safety/leasehold charges are a good reason (along with higher house debt costs) so I agree on that one.

Do you have the numbers for say, 2021, when we were still under restrictions I think, so we can contrast and compare?

2021 is an anomaly year with sales higher in London ( 42% higher than average ) and most of the country due to the pandemic
Whatever the sales were they wouldn’t be representative so a pointless comparison.

Nor would sales be for at least a few years after as so many people had ‘just moved’

but I’m sure if you Google you’ll find something