Houses wildly overpriced near me and NOTHING is shifting

[toffeeapple45]

My parents are house-hunting at the moment in the area close to me, and it's so frustrating. They've sold, but literally every "downsizable" house in my area is on for genuinely I would reckon about 200,000 more than they're worth. I think 2022 was about the peak in my area, but these prices look as if prices had carried on tracking up for the last four years. We're in an area that boomed during WFH, but is not going to do so well as people are ordered back to the office - which is certainly not reflected in the pricing. Nothing is shifting at all, and it's only going to get worse with Iran. Houses are going off the market and coming back on for sometimes, insanely more. It feels like people got their houses valued in 2022 and are just never going to accept that the market isn't there any more. I'm irrationally annoyed with one local estate agent who tells everyone their house is worth X when it's just clearly not the case. My parents accepted less than they would probably have got in 2022, because they figure that is what their house is worth now - and they can rent for a bit and they'd rather not be in a chain. GRRRRR.

I think part of it is that people have an ideal (bigger/better) house that they would like to buy, they work out they will "need" X from their present house sale and when X doesn"t appear they just sit there for years blaming "difficult buyers" etc. It is pretty sad how little people understand about finance and the price of debt etc.

The reason
and tbh I’m only going by a few friends who’ve done it
is to test the market
see how much they could get for theirs

None had found anywhere to move but had a vague idea of what they might want

One friend has done it three times over the past 10years. They fancy a move out of the area but if they don’t get enough for the move they want they pull their house off the market again.
They don’t even bother trying to tidy it up.

I think that trend will fall away as people more and more don"t want to find out how much value their house has really lost.

Crazy.

I can see the houses are the same
ones. You can see the old listing and sale photos etc and floor plan
It’s wild the increases some people want.

I was going to say - who could be bothered to get their house ready for sale!

Well no wonder no one is looking at theirs then 🙈

I’m surprised estate agents are even going to take them on if they keep pulling that trick.

Cadiff’s so insane. People are putting things on and costing conversions in because there’s the opportunity to do them, but they haven’t been done. Loads of overpriced properties have been sat there for months or a couple of years.

I think we’re giving up and will get the kitchen done and accept we can’t move.

Exactly the same here in Cheshire.

From an estate agents point of view they
have more properties on the market
Which looks good for them
and
if they do get an offer the owners will look around

I can’t understand how estate agents are surviving with so few houses selling.

I’ve googled that question

• Around 286 firms went out of business in the year ending July 2024.

• The rise in insolvencies occurred even during times when the housing market was relatively active, showing extreme pressure on smaller, traditional agencies.

• While some are going bust, others are downsizing or switching to self-employed models to survive

Oh that’s interesting, cheers for that.

Many are going bust, it has been going on for a while as the market stalls due to silly prices, a lot relied on rentals I think to stay afloat, that will be much harder now as well with the very large drops in immigration we are seeing.

https://thenegotiator.co.uk/news/agencies-people-news/huge-leap-in-the-number-of-estate-agencies-going-bust/

Deep down they know they are living in fantasy land.

The most recent one I’ve seen is a house with value increased by £120k - since 2023! All they’ve done is knock one wall down inside. That’s it. No new kitchens or bathrooms or anything of value

I don’t know why the house price drop is a shock to anyone. In 2021/2022 house asking prices were artificially raised due to the stamp duty holiday and people who wanted to upsize offering close to those asking prices. When price growth is artificial and not supported by a growing economy there’s only one way prices will go and thats regardless of other impacts like the war in Iran and new rules for landlords which will mean a speedier drop now too.

Sadly for me and my husband we were desperate to move, decided to wait out the 2022 madness (no-one believed me at that time that prices would drop, the only people who were saying it were a few property experts) and bought in 2024 knowing full well prices would drop further from then on and they absolutely have.

We’ve had a new agent open in the last few months, part of a chain from nearby city and a new independent one a year ago. I think though the bit about nearby city is the key as we are rapidly becoming a commuter town for that city. That city has a lot of people moving out of London so prices are now high and pushing people priced out to where we are.

Things are selling, a few within a couple of days in a certain part, the rest at a steady pace. A friend is trying to buy and pissed off as offered in November and now in rented waiting for it to go through. She was trying to sort out more viewings and 2 places went before she could view.

The story down the road is different though with a village we have thought about and was really popular during Covid years, coming to pretty much a total halt.

Did it sell?

Only just gone on.

Ok.

Rightmove recently updated their sold house data for Dec'25-Feb'26 and the results are intrrrsting.
In my area, popular with professional families, both British and immigrants, the freehold houses are shifting, half of them sold for over 1mil, or the cheapest purpose built flats (the ex-council ones or the ones with service charges over 3.5K but priced to sell, so 300-400K) .
The 550-700K properties, that most FTB families here would buy, seem to not move at all.

Not a single conversion flat sold because they combine worst of 2 worlds - leasehold with service charges, but priced almost like terraced, in comparison to purpose-built they have tiny bedrooms and long useless corridors, bad soundproofing and insulation, no lift. Even when they have garden, it's often shared/split in half with ugly stairs coming from the 1st floor into the garden.

Thanks for posting that information @JustAlice . I mentioned the dreaded leasehold tenure a few weeks ago on here as being a factor why the market is the way it is. I think the laws are changing though regarding leasehold? In any case I would never buy anything with that tenure regardless of location and price.

The number of leasehold flats up for sale will likely increase this year with more and more landlords selling up (or trying to).

@topcat2026 the new laws say nothing about service charges unfortunately, so they have no legal limits.
And a lot of flats in London already reached SC that make people think twice. If SC is 3.5K/year today, it can easily be 7K in a few years and so on.

Where do you live that a FTB can afford a 550-700k house?!
I'm assuming somewhere in London...

@mjf981 yes and 2-bedroom flats in our area sell above 500K these days. A lot of FTB families choose them normally.
But this is the thing, they are not selling now, probably because at 5% rate it's cheaper to rent + uncertainty about new immigration rules.