BLOGS

A two-speed sales market is taking hold

The UK sales market is no longer moving at one pace. Recent research from LRG puts the gap in stark terms: homes priced accurately from launch sell in around 36 days on average, against 127 days for those that come to market too high and are later reduced — roughly three-and-a-half times longer. Zoopla's own analysis lands on a similar pattern, finding that reduced-price properties take 2.4 times longer to sell than those priced correctly from day one.

Rightmove data reinforces the point. Around 32% of listings for existing homes saw a price reduction in the year to May, and those properties took 91 days longer to sell on average than ones that never needed a cut. Zoopla has also found that 44% of homes listed over the past three years failed to sell at all, with a third of those sellers later admitting the asking price was too ambitious from the start.

REalyse transaction data over the past 12 months tells the same story from a different angle. Homes that sold at or above their final asking price had a median time on market of just 44 days. Properties that eventually sold with a 10%+ discount to asking took a median of 88 days — twice as long — and made up over 25,000 of the sample, a meaningful share of total transactions. The pattern holds across the full distribution: median days on market rise steadily from 44 days (sold at or above asking) to 67 days (0–5% discount) to 82 days (5–10% discount) to 88 days (10%+ discount). Pricing accuracy, not just headline market conditions, is now one of the clearest predictors of sales velocity.

Housebuilders are absorbing the cost of overhang

For volume housebuilders, the consequence of mispriced or slow-moving stock is not just a longer sales cycle — it is a direct hit to margin. Vistry Group, one of the UK's largest housebuilders, warned of a £30m first-half loss after resorting to heavy discounting to clear unsold homes. The average discount offered to private buyers reached 7.1%, up from just 1.4% a year earlier, as the group worked to cut its stock of unsold private homes from around £600m to under £300m.

The pressure is most visible where off-plan sales have collapsed. Hamptons research shows only 33% of new-build homes across England and Wales sold before completion in 2025, down sharply from a peak of 49% in 2016. In London specifically, CBRE analysis of Molior data found developers gave up trying to sell 34% of new homes built last year after failing to find a buyer, up from 25% the year before. Savills separately reports that new-home sales rates across England fell by a third between late 2024 and August 2025, from around 0.5 sales per outlet per week to 0.3.

The mechanics are straightforward but costly. Every month a completed unit sits unsold ties up development finance, delays capital recycling into the next phase, and increases exposure to falling values if conditions soften further. Housebuilders that once relied on forward sales to fund construction are now carrying more finished stock on balance sheet, and clearing it quickly is increasingly only achievable through price.

What this means for developers, lenders and investors

The bifurcation has practical implications across the value chain. For developers and development managers, the case for pricing new phases against robust, granular comparables — rather than optimistic GDV assumptions carried over from earlier in the cycle — has rarely been stronger. REalyse-style comparables data, benchmarked by property type, postcode district and recent achieved £/sqft, can help identify where local absorption rates support a premium and where they do not, before a scheme launches rather than after it has sat unsold for months.

For lenders and credit teams, the discounting pattern is a useful early warning signal. Loan books with concentrated exposure to schemes showing rising days-on-market or widening asking-to-achieved gaps in their local comparables warrant closer monitoring, particularly where forward sales cover has weakened. Planning and pipeline data can also flag areas where supply is building faster than local absorption, ahead of it showing up in completions.

For investors and agents, the same data cuts both ways. Areas where housebuilders are discounting most aggressively can present buying opportunities below replacement cost, provided the underlying rental or resale fundamentals stack up. Cross-referencing discount levels against comparable rental yields and local demographic demand helps separate genuine value from stock that is simply hard to sell for structural reasons — location, unit mix, or specification.

Outlook

The message from this data is consistent across sources: pricing discipline, not just market timing, is now the dominant driver of sales speed. Housebuilders that price new stock tightly against current comparables — rather than against expectations set earlier in the cycle — are more likely to sell close to asking and preserve margin. Those that don't risk joining the growing pool of discounted, slow-moving inventory that is now weighing on sector profitability. As supply remains elevated in parts of the country, expect pricing accuracy to matter more, not less, over the coming year.